--- Charles Brown <charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote: CB: There are studies of this. Anthropologist Merville Herskovits finds African cultural survivals in African American culture. For example, Santaria.
Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Angela Davis disagree with your speculation of no African culturalness to Black American music.
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I didn't say _NO_ African culturalness, and of course I don't really know and may be talking out of my ass. But it seems counterintuitive to me that it would be major. I mean, if we were to club some white teenagers today in LA and Denver over the head and sell them into slavery in the Inca Empire via the Wayback Machine, I don't think their grandchildren would be listening to music heavily influenced by Radiohead. They would be listening to Incan-based music. Compound that with the fact that our hypothetical teenagers all speak one language and have one general culture, and African slaves did not.
(Do we even know what West African music was like in the 1600s and 1700s?)
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