i'm not sure if that's true. (see below) what do you hope to achieve by slamming the south? is there some insight we gain that will prevent lefties from making some terrible mistake or wrong move if we don't happen to always, always remember that All That's Horrid About Capitalism In the US Is The South?
It seems like a distraction. anyway, I don't know how accurate this is, i'd like to be corrected by a musical historian on the list, but this is what Michael Ventura wrote in an essay years ago, pointing to some Irish (and I've since heard, possibly Scottish) influence on the rise of jazz and tap dancing. From the essay, "Hear That Long Snake Moan":
I don't mean to get so academic, but remember, we're on the trail of the metaphysics of American music. It's a very winding trail, it goes through jungles, and there are places where it's completely overgrown. The major studies don't mention that Africans were not the only slaves in the West Indies; they were not even the only slaves who had a non-Christian -- usually called, in unconsciously slanted language, "pre-Christian" -- cosmology. In the l650s, after Oliver Cromwell had conquered Ireland in a series of massacres, he left his brother, Henry, as the island's governor. In the next decade Henry sold thousands of Irish people, mostly women and children, as slaves to the West Indies. Estimates range between 30,000 and 80,000. The higher number seems quite likely, in the light of a letter Henry Cromwell wrote to a slaver, saying "it is not in the least doubted you may have such number of them as you thinke fitt.. . I desire to express as much zeal in this design as you could wish." This Henry of the Uprighte Harte, as he called himself, said in another letter to a slaver who wanted only girls, "I think it might be of like advantage to your affaires there, and to ours heer, if you shoulde thinke fitt to sende 1500 or 2000 young boys of from twelve to fourteen years of age, to the place aforementioned. We could well spare them . . .."
The Irish slaves, most of them women, were mated with the Africans. There is "a tradition" -- as historians sometimes call something which they have good reason to believe but can't prove -- that up to the early nineteenth century there were blacks on some of the islands who spoke Gaelic. In any case, the West Indian accent becomes much more comprehensible when the Irish slaves are taken into account. If you don't know anyone from there, listen to the language in a film like The Harder They Come. The Irish tinge is unmistakable.
Why were these people sold into slavery? Henry gives us clues: "Concerning the young women, although we must use force takeinge them up, yet it beinge so much to their owne goode..." And in another letter, the one in which he suggests some men be taken too: "who knows but that it may be the meanes to make them Englishmen, I mean rather Christians." In other words, Henry was trying to sell off as many pagans as he could This was at the height of the English witch-craze, which was a pogrom against those who still adhered to the Celtic religions. Ireland was the stronghold for the old beliefs. This, better than anything else, explains the mercilessness of Cromwell's massacres there. How widespread could such beliefs have been? I know a woman whose Irish grandmother, in the 1950s, still referred to Christianism as "the new religion," and taught her granddaughter what she could remember of the Celtic rites. Jeanne Moreau's film L'Adolescente tells of a similar experience she had with her grandmother in rural France in the late 1930s. Such stories speak of traditions that had strength through the nineteenth century in Europe. In Cromwell's time "sabbats" are well documented throughout the continent, and in Ireland the old ways were more a way of life than anywhere else.
And so we find, in West Indian Voodoo, a center-post, a gaily painted pole very like the maypole that survives in Europe from Celtic pagan celebration, at the center of every ceremony. You see it plainly in Maya Deren's 1949 footage, made into a documentary in the l950s, titled, as is her book, Divine Horsemen. The gods are said to enter through the centerpost, and the dances for most ceremonies revolve around the centerpost. We don't find this in the accounts from Africa. It speaks of a definite Irish-pagan influence. Virtually every account of Voodoo notes, at some point, how similar are its sorcery practices to the practices of European witchcraft, but no one has, to my knowledge, mentioned the connection with the Irish slaves.
We will never have evidence, but nevertheless we have a good case: practicing pagans from Ireland infused their beliefs with the Africans, mingling in Voodoo two great streams of non-Christianist metaphysics. The snake, after all, was a holy symbol to both -- Saint Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, and the classic statue of the Virgin Mary with her bare foot crushing a snake, were political cartoons in the sense that they symbolized the Catholic dominion over Celtic paganism. In their beliefs and symbology the pagan Irish were closer to Africa than to Puritan England. This is part of our buried history, and as we bring it out into the light it will become more important.
All of them -- the many, many Africans who created Voodoo and the, let's say, 40,000 Irish who gave to Voodoo some of their flourishes and sorcery -- would have their revenge. Jazz and rock'n'roll would evolve from Voodoo, carrying within them the metaphysical antidote that would aid many a twentieth-century Westerner from both the ravages of the mind-body split codified by Christianism, and the onslaught of technology. The twentieth century would dance as no other had, and, through that dance, secrets would be passed. First North America, and then the whole world, would -- like the old blues says -- "hear that long snake moan."
The rest: http://members.aol.com/aarontstokes/Ventura1.html