African influence on Appalachian Tunes that Originated in the British Isles
FeralReason
wondered if anyone has seen source material or research that supports
this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-time_music - mid-way down the page
under "Appalachia". -- "...common for young white musicians to have
learned the banjo or other instruments from older African American
musicians living in their area. Their influence can also be felt in
the ornamentation of old-time music which includes the third and
seventh blue notes, and sliding tones. Sliding tones are not found in
British Isles folk music outside of certain styles of Irish music,
whose influence on Appalachian music is considered minimal ..."
Thought this may have come from the Campbell/Sharp book on English
Folk Songs in Appalachia - but I re-read it and there is no reference
to this.
Lyle Lofgren
> I found this un-substantiated passage in a Wikipedia article and
> wondered if anyone has seen source material or research that supports
> this:
>
> under "Appalachia". -- "...common for young white musicians to have
> learned the banjo or other instruments from older African American
> musicians living in their area. Their influence can also be felt in
> the ornamentation of old-time music which includes the third and
> seventh blue notes, and sliding tones. Sliding tones are not found in
> British Isles folk music outside of certain styles of Irish music,
> whose influence on Appalachian music is considered minimal ..."
> Thought this may have come from the Campbell/Sharp book on English
> Folk Songs in Appalachia - but I re-read it and there is no reference
> to this.
Sharp had nothing about that in his book, which is not surprising,
since he was looking for British influences, and was highly selective
in what he collected.
The earliest reference I know of to the banjo is in Thomas Jefferson's
"Notes on the State of Virginia," in which he writes, "The instrument
proper to them (slaves) is the banjar, which they brought hither from
Africa."
There's lots more information on the influences in Cece Conway's
"African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions,"
published by the American Folklore Society.
In some instances, such as Frank Hutchison and Jimmie Rodgers, the
influence is obvious. Several other Appalachian musicians of the same
era, such as Dock Boggs and, later, Bill Monroe, described learning
songs and playing techniques from African-American neighbors. The
influence would have been even greater as hill folk got phonographs. I
don't know if anyone has written a definitive book on the subject,
though.
The influence went both ways, of course, as evidenced by musicians
such as Joe Thompson. I don't remember where I saw this, but somewhere
there's a photograph of black musicians playing for a white picnic --
in Virginia, as I remember. They would have been playing breakdown
tunes, but perhaps with some slides and blue notes??
Lyle
FeralReason
> On Dec 31, 2:04 pm, FeralReason <gcferr...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > I found this un-substantiated passage in a Wikipedia article and
> > wondered if anyone has seen source material or research that supports
> > this:
>
Thanks Lyle. Looks like Conway's book is a good next step for me to
investigate !
Tera Barber
> I found this un-substantiated passage in a Wikipedia article and
> wondered if anyone has seen source material or research that supports
> this:
>
> under "Appalachia". -- "...common for young white musicians to have
> learned the banjo or other instruments from older African American
> musicians living in their area. Their influence can also be felt in
> the ornamentation of old-time music which includes the third and
> seventh blue notes, and sliding tones. Sliding tones are not found in
> British Isles folk music outside of certain styles of Irish music,
> whose influence on Appalachian music is considered minimal ..."
> Thought this may have come from the Campbell/Sharp book on English
> Folk Songs in Appalachia - but I re-read it and there is no reference
> to this.
I cannot vouge for the accuracy of what is written here, nor will I
dispute it. However, it is curious to note that Bill Monroe said that
he learned much about music during his youth and credited much of his
"bluesy" style from the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz, a black man
who Bill befriended.
Tud Jones
seem to recall another well-known musician from Kentucky (Ike Everly
or Merle Travis) having mentioned learning from Schultz as well.
tonythomas
> wondered if anyone has seen source material or research that supports
> this:
>
> under "Appalachia". -- "...common for young white musicians to have
> learned the banjo or other instruments from older African American
> musicians living in their area. Their influence can also be felt in
> the ornamentation of old-time music which includes the third and
> seventh blue notes, and sliding tones. Sliding tones are not found in
> British Isles folk music outside of certain styles of Irish music,
> whose influence on Appalachian music is considered minimal ..."
> Thought this may have come from the Campbell/Sharp book on English
> Folk Songs in Appalachia - but I re-read it and there is no reference
> to this.
Imagine if I posted a query about the relationship between the texts
of ballads and songs sung by the great Almeda Riddle
and popular music. Then someone responded by talking about Cindy
Walkers' tunes for Bob Wills and Bing Crosby.
The query was about African American influence on English origined
ballads. An in accurate response comes about the banjo and Cece's
book is recommended. Cece's book which I know by heart and has been
at the center of my return and work in music has not one word about
that topic. Nor does anything about the banjo, or misinformation
about Arnold Schultz.
But any words vaguely connecting some Negro with something are seen as
suitable answers to anything having to do with African American, folk
who are otherwise wise make thoughtless responses..
Then old time music people wondeer why so few Black people have
anything to do with OTM.
There is some work on the influences of British origined ballads on
African American music, particularly in the
socalled--for reasons I and others have explained here misnamed- Blues
ballads, and the relationship of these songs to the later formation of
the blues, particularly in verse structure, as well as widespread
borrowing of some stock floating versus.
Probably, whatever work has been done about "American" influences on
such ballads might provide a key to African American
influences. Probably whatever degree these songs have moved from oral
ballad singing to musically associate4d songs and dance tunes reflects
the African and African American influence, since while in West
African singing long and indeed longer than the longest Childs songs
telling history and family background are a standard part of folk and
professional music and passed down for mellenia, singers of these
songs perform them accompanied by instruments, and where possible by
ensembles of musicians. Certainly, how and why a number of these
tunes got put to banjo music might suggest Black influence. Some
people believe--although I have not seen this in an academicly sourced
people of research--that "Shady Grove" may be based initially on Matty
Groves, so that any similar transformations might suggest motion.
A place to look for this influence would also be in the fairly common
collection of such ballads from African
Americans which one could find not in Child or Sharp but in the work
of many of the early and mid 20th Century folk music collectors like
the Lomaxes and Botkin but also John Jacob niles. One might want to
look at Niles' book on folk tunes and casual songs sung by Black
soldiers in WWI although his big collecgtion of ballads notes which
tunes were collected from African Americans. One would look at
whatever difference the ballads collected from African Americans
reflected both from the british origins and see to what degree they
are more extreme expressions of general motion in American ballads.
Just a few corrections of what has been said previously in this thread
There is a lot of confusion about Arnold Schultz. Schultz was a
fiddler and a FLAT PICKING guitarist who was capable of playing the
guitar in styles that owed much to Jazz guitar playing and urban blues
[think Lonnie Johnson]. He had a deep impression on Western Kentucky
guitarists, but the roots of the the West Kentucky originated guitar
playing he is incorrectly assigned to belong with other less-famous
guitarists in that area and nearby areas of Tennessee and Missouri.
Bill Monroe--and anyone who actually remembered Schultz--was insistent
that Schultz was a flat picking guitarist and not a finger picker and
mostly known as a fiddler. The great Merle Travis never claimed to
have played or heard or seen Schultz but to have learned guitar from
some Western Kentucky Guitarists who claimed that they had heard from
or learned from people who had heard Schultz.
Monroe hardly "befriended" Schultz. Schultz was one of the leading
local professional musicians who travelled through the area when
Monroe was a child. He was widely known as a fiddler and guitarist
and had played beyond the region in shows and other paid venues. He
was friends with Monroe's Uncle Pen Vandaver (Uncle Pen!) and played
music with Pen. As a child Monroe suffered a lot of abuse from his
brothers because of his physical deformities (he was extremely cross
eyed until his brothers got jobs in oil refineries near chicago and
paid for an operation when he was a teenager) and spent a lot of his
youth in the mountain cabin of fiddling Uncle Pen.
One has to be careful dealing with Monroe's explanation of his musical
roots especially as the years went on. Monroe, like Earl Scruggs, has
come to present him self as an originator of his music without any
reference to similar approaches to country string band music that were
growing among his peers in the music in the 1930s and 1940s, let alone
the strong influences of non-Country music that were part of what he
[put together. He has sought to situate his music as spring like
Athena from the head of Zeus, purely from the most deep roots, the
"Ancient Tones" of European and African American music. While Monroe
would wax long and hard about Uncle Pen and Arnold Schultz, he would
say
nothing about the Prairie Ramblers, the Delmore Brothers, or about the
profound influence on his musical approach that jazz swing and western
swing had on his music. To be sure Monroe's music did have reference
to these music traditions, but it was very much a product of broad
evolution among country music entertainers as the music became
professionalized and commercialized and changed from being chiefly a
dance music to a performance music like very much of all kinds of
popular music in the 1940s and 1950s. But on the other hand, Monroe
was never honest as Kenny Baker who used to say that to understand
Bluegrass fiddle you had to understand Jazz.
African American influence on European American music of all kinds
from the initial days of enslavement here is too profound to discuss
in regard to some musician that Monroe heard as a child.
Jefferson's was not the first discussion of the banjo either his
comments in notes on Virginia or his sight of a spike lute being
carried off a slave ship but a slave--said instrument could not be a
banjo because it had one string and no chanterrelle. The initial
reports of New World banjos played by Africans go back to the 1600s in
the Caribbean basin in Martinique and more recent discoveries--not in
Cece's book, from Columbia. His view that the instrument came
directly from Africa may not be true as much evidence points to the
banjo as an instrument that was synthesized out of African antecedants
in the New World. But as a major slaveholder and one of the inventors
of pseudo-science racism, Jefferson cannot be expected to have much
accuracy.
The earliest US American mention of Blacks playing banjos go back to
the 1730s, unlike fiddling which go back to the 17th century. We
believe that banjo playing was generally restricted to African
American music for African Americans before the 1730s, but a series of
slave insurrections and threats thereof during that period cast more
attention upon African American internal life following those years.
The initial mention of the banjo among Black folk coincides with the
initial mention of all sorts of other African American activity that
had probably gone on since Africans were brought to the current US but
were not previously noticed by European whose writings we still have.
These early mentions of the banjo are often written as if the readers
already know what a banjo is, unlike say the West Indian and South
Ameruican descriptions of banjo playing from the 17th Century where
the writers explain what the banjo is to the readers who are not
expected to know.
Again, it must be mentioned that the dating for all of this reflects
what are the earliest mentions of banjo playing that have been
discovered by banjo scholars since Epstein began her work in the
1960s. What other mention that has not been discovered is subject to
speculation. Moreover, we are talking about written traces of
European observations of African American life. There is very little
written observation of anything by Africans in the Americas from this
period apart from Islamic religious writing. We have learned to
separate the reports and their location with the actual diffusion of
the banjo, although they probably do express something about that.
However, directly linking European mention of the banjo, especially in
the United States, and the actual existence and geographical spread of
the banjo as we once might have done seems a risky view.
Tony Thomas
FeralReason
> On Dec 31 2009, 3:04 pm, FeralReason <gcferr...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > I found this un-substantiated passage in a Wikipedia article and
> > wondered if anyone has seen source material or research that supports
> > this:
>
I think any examples or documentation post 1920 (beginnings of
American Radio) are too difficult to relate to the question of how
some of these UK tunes that came over with the Scots-Irish migration
became Americanized. Bill Monroe and all of bluegrass fall into this
category since they are part of an eclecticism fostered by radio that
becomes increasingly difficult to untangle as time goes on. WWI
introduces similar wild cards. Hopefully there are sources and
scholarship somewhere from someone with better research tools than I
have at my disposal.
I am not a musicologist, but it seems to me that a sound research
approach would be to take several documented tunes from the British
Isles that have come to us through the Appalachians, and then take the
same tunes (as documented by Sharp or others) as they have been
transformed in the US. If the comparison yields common patterns, then
examine what was happening in this area of the country during this
time period and propose theories. Although I suspect a strong case can
be made for African influence, I certainly don't have anything that
would stand up in court. For this focus area -- Appalachian tunes --
the time period to be investigated would probably be from about 1715
or so (beginnings of the Scots-Irish immigration) to perhaps to the
outbreak of WWI or possibly somewhat earlier. I think most of these
tunes had reached their "American forms" well before 1900, perhaps
before the end of the civil war.
I'm sure someone already thought of this and that there are probably
dozens of dissertations out there... I just want to get copies of
these tunes so we can play both versions. That's the kind of research
I CAN do. :-)
I do appreciate all of the interesting and sometimes passionate
responses. What I am reading here is much richer than anything I am
getting from other groups.
Glenn
Steve Goldfield
so I will just add a few
things to it. First, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals adds some important
observations. She documents
that there were likely more fiddlers of African than European descent
in the 19th century USA.
She also documents laws which outlawed African drumming in some
southern states, which
tended to increase interest in the banjo. Second, Hobart Smith said
that he learned
fiddle from an African-American fiddler in his area and he also says
that he learned guitar
from a number of players but what he really liked was the playing of
African-American men
he heard when he was 14 or 15. He specifically mentioned that Blind
Lemon Jefferson came
through and Smith watched Jefferson's fingers and worked out what he
was doing. All of that
is in the liner notes to "The Old Timey Rap" on Topic Records, except
for the part about the
fiddle, which I read somewhere else (not sure of that source). Tommy
Jarrell used to say
that one of his tunes came from an African-American source. Those are
only a few
well-known examples. There were likely countless unknown interactions.
The relationship
of Mississippi John Hurt to his neighbors, Narmour and Smith, and the
recordings of
Andrew Baxter and Jim Booker hint that African-European-Native
American (Baxter was
of mixed African-American and Native American descent) interactions
were more than
the rare exception.
Steve Goldfield
Tera Barber
> On Dec 31 2009, 3:04 pm, FeralReason <gcferr...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > I found this un-substantiated passage in a Wikipedia article and
> > wondered if anyone has seen source material or research that supports
> > this:
>
A nice treatise.