A wide-ranging, jargon-laden discussion of African-American music.
Floyd (director of the Center for Black Music Research, Columbia
College, Chicago) combines history and theory, beginning with
African-American music's roots and progressing chronologically from
early spirituals through blues, jazz, R&B, gospel, Motown, pop,
and concert-hall music. Dozens of figures, both well-known and
obscure, are mentioned, along with key musical works that are
analyzed with a blend of anthropological, musicological, and
self-made terms. Floyd believes that "Signifyin(g)" - using
metaphoric or indirect means as a mode of artistic expression - is
the key clement of African-American musical style. He identifies
"Call-Response," the use of a structure based on theme (the "call")
and counter-theme ("response"), as a basis for much
African-American expression. He shows how, in this tradition, the
performance itself is far more important than the piece performed.
Some of Floyd's ideas are controversial, such as his essentialist
assertion that there is an African "racial memory" among
African-Americans that influences the kinds of music they produce -
a notion that oversimplifies a complex process including cultural,
musical, social, and individual innovations by which a musical
style is shaped. Floyd also tends to lump together such varied
performers as early bluesmen Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mississippi
John Hurt, calling both "Mississippi Moaners," although Jefferson
was from Texas, Hurt sang in a relaxed, open-voiced style, and
neither is a typical representative of the Mississippi blues
school. Many of the practices Floyd ascribes solely to
African-American musicians, such as improvising new words based on
stock sets of lyrical themes, are found in folk cultures throughout
the world. Finally, his personal predilection for black
concert-hall music over traditional or popular forms distorts the
work. Of limited interest to the general reader, though it will
inspire discussion in the musicological community. (Kirkus Reviews)
When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues tradition before him. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues, a tradition rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa.
Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. Instead, he recognizes European influences, while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, "Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. That's what the memory is....When a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it."
Grounding his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener, Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a force with the power to enrich cultures the world over.
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