African American Music

IV

Late 1800s

Following the end of the war, the United States Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act granting freedom and citizenship to over 4 million former slaves. The patterns of black cultural life changed as former slaves adjusted to freedom. With the creation of land-grant colleges, former slaves and their descendants had new educational opportunities that in turn produced future leaders for black America at the dawn of the 20th century. The Fisk University Jubilee Singers and other student groups disseminated concert choral arrangements of slave songs throughout the United States and Europe during this period. A second generation of highly visible black singers likewise graced the concert stage at this time—particularly Anna Madah, Emma Louise Hyers, Nellie Brown Mitchell, Marie Selika Williams, and Flora Batson, as well as the celebrated M. Sissieretta Jones (the “Black Patti”), a gifted soprano who sang at the White House and made three global tours as the star of her own touring show.

Blackened-face minstrelsy, which initially developed in the antebellum era with white actors who performed in dark makeup and mimicked black stereotypes, became extremely popular during the late 1800s. Many African American entertainers performed in blackface shows, bringing authentic Negro folk songs and dances such as the cakewalk and the hoedown to the popular American stage for the first time. African American musical celebrities of the time included Billy Kersands, Sam Lucas, and James Bland. Bland, a composer as well as entertainer, wrote more than 600 songs, including “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” the state song emeritus of Virginia. Other African American composers of popular songs during the period included Gussie Davis and Ernest Hogan.

By the end of the 19th century the syncopated instrumental music used to accompany plantation dances had evolved into “ragged” (or “jig”) piano, which itinerant black pianists played in logging and mining camps, honky-tonk dives, red-light districts, and saloons in the South and along the eastern seaboard. Initially improvised, these ragged compositions gave rise around the 1890s to ragtime music—namely, ragtime songs (sometimes called “coon songs” or cakewalk songs) and ragtime piano—an early precursor of jazz. Ragtime emphasized a heavily syncopated treble melody against a steady bass line in duple meter (two beats to the bar). Among the influential black composers of ragtime were Scott Joplin, Thomas Turpin, Scott Hayden, Joe Jordan, James Scott, and Eubie Blake.

The blues also emerged in the South around the end of the 19th century. Bunk Johnson and W. C. Handy recalled first hearing the blues roughly between 1880 and 1903. The music drew upon earlier black folk-song forms and styles such as lined-out hymns, spirituals, field hollers, and work songs. Unlike these repertories, early blues featured a solo singer accompanied by an unamplified guitar or string band. As popularized by Handy, the standardized model for the blues consisted of a three-line lyric with an aab rhyme scheme, a corresponding twelve-bar melody, and a distinctive chord progression (series of chords). The blues strongly influenced the development of jazz as well as later styles of popular music such as rock and roll and rhythm and blues.

---

---

The roots of black gospel music can be traced back to song practices developed in newly established Pentecostal and Holiness denominations within urban black ghettos in the 1870s and 1880s. Black gospel—which incorporated elements of the lined-out hymn, Negro spiritual, and the blues—began to crystallize as a distinct musical style around the 1900s. First introduced by unaccompanied male quartets singing in close (“barbershop”) harmony, it was later popularized by soloists and solo-choral groups that sang with piano or organ accompaniment. Pioneering composers of gospel songs included Charles A. Tindley, Thomas A. Dorsey, W. Herbert Brewster, and Lucie Eddie Campbell, as well as the singer-composers Roberta Martin, Mahalia Jackson, and James Cleveland.

V

The 20th Century

The 20th century found African Americans struggling to move into the mainstream of American musical entertainment and achievement. The brothers John Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson captured the spirit of unity and uplift in 1900 with the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which became known as the Negro National Anthem.

Jazz, which had developed by the 1920s, perhaps best symbolized the popularity of African American music. It evolved as an improvised style rooted in the fusion of blues, ragtime, brass band, and syncopated dance music. The blues, a fundamental component of jazz, also exploded in popularity in the 1920s with such “city blues” artists as Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, and Lucille Hegamin, and folk-blues singers “Pappa” Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Robert Johnson. Prominent pioneers of solo jazz improvisation included Louis Armstrong, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, as well as singers Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.

Additional styles of black popular music emerged in the United States during the 20th century, including rhythm and blues, soul, and funk. Rhythm and blues (R&B) emerged during the period around World War II (1939-1945) among Southern black immigrants in urban areas. Primarily vocal music used for dancing, R&B featured a lead singer—generally with back-up vocal quartet or quintet—who sang 32-bar popular ballads or the 12-bar blues. The style was popularized from the late 1940s to the 1960s by Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker, Ruth Brown, and Dinah Washington. Since the mid-20th century R&B has served as a foundation for much of America’s pop music. In the 1950s it gave rise to rock and roll performed by such stars as Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard. Around 1954 Ray Charles merged R&B with black gospel and created soul music, which gained broad acceptance in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with performers such as James Brown, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, and the Temptations. Brown was also one of the chief creators of funk music, developed in the late 1960s from a synthesis of blues, rock, jazz, and gospel. Disco, hip-hop, and rap reflected new forms of black urban vernacular expression during the 1970s and after.

African American concert artists and composers also made considerable gains in American classical music throughout the 20th century. During the first decade of the 1900s composers Harry T. Burleigh, Will Marion Cook, and John Rosamond Johnson explored the concept of musical nationalism through deliberate use of black folk idioms in concert music and music theater. These ideals were endorsed in the 1920s and 1930s by Harlem Renaissance writers, who encouraged classically trained black composers to write in a nationalistic vein and exhorted black concert artists to perform this music. Composers Clarence Cameron White, R. Nathaniel Dett, Florence Price, and William Grant Still contributed substantial works to this tradition.

By the 1950s black composers of classical music turned their attention to other compositional styles and techniques. Ulysses Kay, Howard Swanson, and George Walker composed large-scale symphonic works, for example, in a neoclassic style that bore no connection to traditional black musical idioms. In later decades, black composers explored such avant-garde compositional techniques as serialism (Hale Smith), electronic music (Olly Wilson), and minimalism (Alvin Singleton), and David Baker experimented with third-stream music, a synthesis of jazz and classical music.

Concert singers Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson opened concert halls around the world for black performers in the first half of the 20th century, while William Warfield, Leontyne Price, George Shirley, and Simon Estes broke down racial barriers in opera in the second half of the century. Similarly, concert pianists Helen Hagan, Natalie Hinderas, Leon Bates, André Watts, and Awadagin Pratt made significant inroads for black instrumentalists, as did Dean Dixon, Everett Lee, Paul Freeman, James DePriest, Tania León, Isaiah Jackson, and Michael Morgan for black symphony conductors.

VI

Current Trends

At the beginning of the 21st century, African American artists and styles played a large role in the popular music of the United States and other countries around the world. Rap music, which has origins that can be traced back to the 19th-century black dance tradition called pattin’ juba as well as to more recent musical styles, continued to grow in influence and popularity. Once exclusively an African American form, rap and hip-hop are now embraced by many different cultures and produce more nonblack musical stars than ever before. Some artists have also begun to combine rap with other styles of music: Composer Gregory Walker has written several such works, including dream n the hood (1991, performed 1994), composed for a chamber orchestra with a rapper; and Haitian American composer Daniel Bernard Roumain—also known as DBR—has created innovative works combining classical music, jazz, hip-hop, and folk music. As has been true for more than a century, African Americans continue to be on the cutting edge of musical development and influence.

	More from Encarta
	•  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain