[lbo-talk] Southern culture vs African-American Music (was other things)

[ravi]

On Nov 19, 2007, at 3:48 PM, Chris Doss wrote:
>
> Does suffering have a 4/4 rhythm, a I-IV-V chord
> progression, and a song structure involving
> alternating verses, choruses, and bridges? Does it use
> a pentatonic scale?
>
> I don't know, but I suspect that -- given that
> slaveowners tried to wipe out traces of African tribal
> cultures, and hence African music, in their slaves --
> "Black" music was derived almost totally from
> 19th-century "White" Southern folk and church music.
> Since that is the only stuff black people would have
> heard.
>

On the other hand, I have heard that a lot of the wailing and so on,  
in the fields, to which blues roots have often been traced, grew out  
of surreptitious ways to continue to use native songs and such.

But anyway, my point is to question what significance should be  
assigned to where the music is derived from when assigning credit to a  
culture. The very thing you point to in fact makes a different case: a  
simple three chord progression is not (and cannot be) the significant  
differentiating factor that makes the blues what it is in distinction  
from southern white folk music.

	--ravi


> --- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> And if, as I
>> asked, a significant contributor to the birth of
>> Black music (say the
>> blues) is the suffering meted out to blacks by
>> whites, then that
>> negative influence would cancel out (if not
>> overwhelm) any "roots"
>> claims, wouldn't it?
>>