ACTIVITY #2:
Explore the evolution of African American music
and how it gradually entered and influenced popular culture.
In the Beginning…
Spirituals, field hollers, and work songs are the earliest forms of African-American musical expression, deriving from the conditions of enslavement. As Africans began to assimilate, and lose closeness to their culture over the 200+ years of slavery’s existence, Christianity began to dominate, resulting in a centuries-long attachment to the religion. Being forced over from Africa to the United States, religion was initially seen as means of control and assimilation. As time passed, Christianity became a source of comfort and survival. Spirituals served multiple purposes; they could be full of elation or despair depending on the context. They served to get people through laborious, monotonous work. They were hummed softly during fleeting moments of rest. They served to lull the recently deceased gently into the afterlife. For the bravest, they also served as coded messages detailing the pathways to freedom via the Underground Railroad. So even though the relationship to this forced conversion is problematic at best, and traumatic at worst, Christianity has played a key role in African-American musical development.
The Reconstruction era dissolving into the early Jim Crow era sees the typically religion-charged field hollers and work songs take on more secular (non-religious) themes as they travelled through different work farms, school yards, street corners, and sometimes prison yards. These adaptations of songs from enslavement would eventually become the blues. It is also during this time that Black chorus groups like the famous Jubilee Singers of historically Black Fisk University would give spiritual songs from slavery a platform and their first exposure to a general audience outside of plantations, cementing their status as influential stepping stones to modern music.
Photo: "Funeral, Antebellum U.S. South, 19th cent.", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora
QUESTIONS:
Trivia / Guess: What musical instrument originated in Africa and was introduced to the United States?
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THE BANJO!
The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by African Americans in the United States.
The modern banjo derives from instruments that have been recorded to be in use in North America and the Caribbean since the 17th century by enslaved people taken from West and Central Africa. Many enslaved Africans would bring instruments with them to the Americas and the Caribbean.[7] Written references to the banjo in North America and the Caribbean appear in the 17th and 18th century. [7] The instrument became increasingly available commercially from around the second quarter of the 19th century due to minstrel performances.[2] The earliest written indication of an instrument akin to the banjo is in the 16th century. Richard Jobson described in 1621 about The Gambia, an instrument in likeness to the banjo, which he termed bandore [7] The term banjo has several etymological claims, one being from the Mandinka language which gives The Gambia its capital name, Banjul.
I take the gothic back to times of enslavement in the United States; so much about our culture and the way we operate as a country has been born from it, from plantation ghost tours, to lynching postcards, to body cam footage. To me, it's more than a t-shirt slogan, social media visibility, or a hashtag. It's about connecting the past to the present, and realizing we've always fit into the narrative.
From "'What is Goth?' Afterword: Goth's Resentment" | J.W. Thurston | Jul. 2021
Photo: I Have Given the World My Songs
Elizabeth Catlett
1947; linocut print
(printed 1989)
Exploration Through Listening:
Influence on the Gothic
In summary, Gothic once referred to the group of people who aided in the fall of the Roman Empire. The Goths were considered barbaric and destructive. When the architecture later came along, the style was compared to the ugly destruction done by the Goths, thus named accordingly. Gothic literature, mostly known for featuring ghosts, monster-like characters (Dracula), and early science fiction (Frankenstein) evolved from a weird sort of nostalgia for medieval Europe, where Gothic architecture was prominent. It also provided an “outlet” of sorts for the projected fear of immigrants and emancipated enslaved people integrating into society.
Gothic Blues takes the darker elements of African American history and daily life—the truth about how violent and depressing slavery was, and how hard its aftermath has been to recover from—as well as the darker aspects of religion & religious storytelling (the crucifixion of Jesus, drinking his blood, etc.), and blends it with the darker aspects of music. Examples of instrumentation in goth music include using minor chords, melodies that can either be stark and simple, layered with ghostly and haunted sounding effects like echos, pianos, and organs, or it could be brash and terrifying, with jumbled up chords, screeching instruments and loud hollers. Lyrics typically include themes that are unsettling, morbid, or depressing.
Sitting side-by-side with Gothic Blues are Blues Novelty Songs; songs that are written deliberately with gothic elements for shock value. These included subjects like murder, voodoo/witchcraft, and various Halloween themes. The early music of Rural Blues artist Skip James, the recording of “Strange Fruit” by Blues & Jazz singer Billie Holiday, the song “Blood Thirsty Blues” by Urban Blues artist Victoria Spivey, and the Electric Blues version of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins “I Put A Spell on You” all fit under the Gothic Blues umbrella.
QUESTIONS:
Why do you think people are drawn to things that are considered “dark”, or “morbid”?
Discuss why non-Black people may be drawn to the pain & experiences of African-Americans.
Where do you think the line can be drawn between appreciation and appropriation?
Visual Examples
Compare and contrast the following visual depictions of the gothic in African American media.
Trigger Warning: Some photos include suggestions of death & violence.
Illustration: "Funeral, Antebellum U.S. South, 19th cent.", Funerals of the enslaved typically took place at night, lit by torches.
Paramount Records advertisement for the song "Death Letter Blues" by urban blues singer Ida Cox. c. 1920s
Paramount Records advertisement for the song "Coffin Blues" by urban blues singer Ida Cox. c. 1920s
Blues singer Screamin' Jay Hawkins posing with his skull Henry. c. 1960s
Painted illustration for the 1956 E.P. "Billie Holiday Sings Strange Fruit".
Edited promo photo from the film Ganja & Hess (1973).
Late 1980s book cover for Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Movie still from Eve's Bayou (1997).
Movie still from Queen of the Damned (2002), starring singer Aaliyah.
Promo photo for Blood of My Blood, Flesh of My Flesh by DMX (1999)
Photograph from the set of a film featuring musician and singer Louis Armstrong performing his song "The Skeleton in the Closet". c. 1920s
Movie poster for 2017 film The Transfiguration.
"I Have Given the World My Songs" | Elizabeth Catlett | linocut print (1947)