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African Contributions to America's Musical Heritage
| Article
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17392 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
4,776 Words |
| Author
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David Evans
David Evans directs graduate programs at Memphis State
University in Ethnomusicology, specializing in folk and
popular music of the southern United States. He has been
involved in research in African-American folk music since the
mid-1960s. He is the author of a biography of early folk blues
singer Tommy Johnson (London: Studio Vista, 1971) and of Big
Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), and is
currently editing a book entitled Memphis Music. Evans has
produced more that twenty albums of blues, gospel, and other
Folk music. Evans is also currently doing field research in
Venezuelan folk music. |
In recent times, African history and culture have become increasingly important, especially to Americans. This is visible in efforts by some black leaders to foster the adoption of "African-American" as a term of self-designation, with the purpose and effect of engendering pride in one's place of origin and heritage. However, in earlier days, when terms such as colored and Negro were preferred, the prevalent view in America was that the slaves arrived here stripped not only of their freedom but of their African culture as well. The basis of black American culture was viewed as their response to slavery and subsequent experiences. This view held that Africa was a distant memory rather than a vital force in creating and sustaining a distinct culture in their new homeland.
A pioneer in black studies was the late anthropologist Melville Herskovits (1895-1963). Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, he conducted comparative studies of African and various New World black cultures, developing several important new and more positive concepts about the processes of acculturation that took place when Africans encountered European cultures in America. These concepts mark a historical progression in the development of a distinct African-American culture over some three and a half centuries.
The first of these concepts is simply the retention of African elements and their associated meanings. For example, words for certain foods, such as yam, goober, okra, and gumbo, have been retained from African languages with essentially their original meanings. Some cultural retentions undergo a further process known as syncretism, whereby similar African European cultural elements are merged or equated to form a single entity whose bicultural derivation is
... (1996 of 29231 Characters)
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