| Contents |
Preface to the 2003 paperback -- Preface to the 1977 edition -- Prologue: The African heritage and the Middle Passage -- Early reports of African music in British and French America. La calinda and the banza ; Other African dancing -- More Black instruments and early white reaction. Drums and other African instruments ; The balafo ; Legal restrictions on instruments -- The role of music in daily life. Funerals ; Pinkster and other African celebrations in the North ; Worksongs and other kinds of African singing -- The acculturation of African music in the new world. The arrival of Africans and their music ; Acculturation in New Orleans -- Conversion to Christianity -- Acculturated Black music in the thirteen colonies. The African jig, a Black-to-white exchange -- African survivals. Persisting musical and cultural patterns ; Black music in New Orleans, 1820-67 -- Acculturated dancing and associated instruments. Patting juba ; Drums, quills, banjo, bones, triangle, tambourine ; Fiddlers ; Instrumental combinations -- Worksongs. Field work and domestic chores ; Industrial and steamboat workers ; Boat songs ; Corn, cane, and other harvest songs ; Singing on the march ; Street cries and field hollers -- Distinctive characteristics of secular Black folk music. Whistling ; Improvisation ; Satire ; Style of singing ; Other secular music --The religious background of sacred Black folk music, 1801-67. Opposition to religious instruction of slaves ; Camp meetings ; Missions to the slaves ; Black religious groups ; Opposition to secular music and dancing -- Distinctive Black religious music. Spirituals ; Attempts to suppress Black religious singing ; The shout ; Funerals -- Early wartime reports and the first publication of a spiritual and its music -- The Port Royal experiment. Historical background ; Earliest published reports ; Wartime publication of song texts and music -- Reports of Black folk music, 1863-67. Criticism of "this barbaric music" ; Recognition of a distinctive folk music ; The shout ; Worksongs ; Performance style ; Introduction of "new songs" by the teachers -- Slave songs of the United States : its editors. William Francis Allen ; Charles Pickard Ware ; Lucy McKim Garrison -- Slave songs of the United States : its publication. The contributors ; Problems of notation ; Assembling the collection ; Publication and reception -- Conclusion -- Appendix I. Musical excerpts from the manuscript diaries of William Francis Allen -- Appendix II. Table of sources for the banjo, chronologically arranged -- Appendix III. Earliest published versions of "Go down, Moses." |
| Abstract |
"'The songs of a slave are word-pictures of every thing he sees, or hears, or feels.'--John Dixon Long, a Philadelphia clergyman, 1857. The cacophony of clanking chains intruded upon the euphony of human song during the "Middle Passage" when--at the behest of ships' officers--slaves being transported to the Americas caused the overcrowded ships to echo with the sounds of dancing feet and harmonious voices. That scene is one of the first which Dena J. Epstein skillfully re-creates in her monumental work on the development and emergence of black folk music in the United States. From the plaintive tones of woe emanating from exiled kings and queens of Africa to the spirited worksongs and 'shouts' of freedmen, Epstein traces the course of early black folk music in all its guises. Her meticulous twenty-year search of diaries, letters, travel accounts, slave narratives, reports by plantation owners and ship captains, and other documents has uncovered a wealth of information on what Frederick Douglass called the 'tones loud, long and deep ... the prayer and complaints of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.' Epstein demonstrates that secular music--the music which evangelists denounced as 'sinful'--flourished among the exiled Africans to a much greater degree than has been recognized. 'Sinful tunes' and spirituals both were familiar to antebellum blacks. The author discusses the breakup of the closed plantation society which had isolated the slaves, and the introduction of the freedmen to the public at large via Slave Songs of the United States (1867), the first published collection of black music. The fascinating genesis of that seminal work is thoroughly covered, as is hitherto unknown information on the acculturation of African music in the New World, musical style, worksongs, religious music, and the Port Royal experiment (a wartime attempt to demonstrate that blacks could manage their own affairs). Epstein's research proves what many have long suspected: dancing and singing could--and did--coexist with forced labor and bitter suffering, providing slaves with the psychological escape that helped them to survive and to retain much of their cultural heritage."--Dust jacket. |
