Slave Music: Types According to Use and Features of the Music

Slave Music: Types by Use and Features of the Music
A uniform cultural characteristic of all the African tribal groups brought to the New World as slaves was the pervasive role of music in all aspects of life. Music had a place in play and work, in mourning and worship, and often the lines between purposes blurred. Making music was a community effort, and all participated to his ability. Music continued to be central to life, even after the participant was plucked from his home and transported and forced to live in an alien land and culture. Slave songs may be divided into categories including work songs, dance music, and worship music.

Work Songs: “Gang” Songs and Field Hollers
Work songs differed according to the type of labor, but always served to pace the labor, pass the time, and make life bearable. The kinds of labor included flashing rice, grinding hominy, spinning, making baskets, loading cargo, processing tobacco or hemp, firing engines, rowing (in coastal areas from Maryland to Florida), tilling fields, clearing land, harvest work, chopping trees (often involving several workers at once), construction, and road building. Descriptions of work songs are not common before 1800, so the modern understanding of them is based on an intermediate stage of development.

The “gang” work song regulated heavy labor that involved dangerous tools such as axes, pick ages, sledge hammers, etc. The song not only paced the work in the speed of the activity but more importantly determined when the men, standing in a row, would strike with the axe or sledge hammer. Since the workers lived together on the same plantation, each knew the songs. The songs often began life as improvised music, but necessarily settled into roughly predictable rhythmic and metric patterns with use. The texts still retained their improvisatory nature, with stanzas and ideas added or deleted for amusement.

Although the audio example does not demonstrate the point, most of the music was responsorial in delivery, that is, one singer led the group by singing part of the line, and all the others joined in to finish it. Responsorial singing is very ancient and here is likely the extension of singing practices used in Africa. Most slave music was sung in responsorial fashion because it built community, but in heavy labor, responsorial singing was essential to assure worker safety.

A critical component of all African American music, then, is the “call and answer” structure of the musical and textual lines. The structure is retained, even when there is only one singer, in both black and white modern popular music. The structure differs significantly to the European approach to melody, which often embraces protracted and unbroken lines. An example is Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” The first line alone requires sixteen beats to state. In African American music such as Blues, the “call” portion might require on a beat or two. Call and answer singing survived in the building by free men of the transcontinental railroad, the prison work gangs of southern penitentiaries into the 1930s, and in the songs of basic training in the U.S. military. The vestiges exist today in popular music.

Field work, such as hoeing, often required work lines to be efficient, and in these circumstances the music did not differ significantly from “gang” songs. Call and answer melodic lines were still the rule, but the absence of the danger of serious injury permitted greater improvisational freedom and exploration, as well as irregular line lengths and more dramatic delivery. There was never a concern among black improvisation for rhyme or syllabification. Syllables were contracted or extended to fit the metric unit. It is also in the field holler, or “arhoolie,” that one can likely find the origin of the modern guitar “lick.” The regional differences in field hollers might also partially explain the regional differences in Blues styles.

Field hollers often included snarls, growls, and other non-musical language or animal sounds, as well as swoops and glissandi (the bluriing of one note into the next without a break between). All slave music, regardless of its use, featured the use of quarter-tone inflections. A quarter-tone is the note between two that are recognized in Western music. An example might be the pitch between the notes E flat and E, that is, the pitch is too high to be E flat and too low to be E.. In Blues, these notes are called "bends."

Work in the cotton fields

Slave owners understood the importance of the work song. They quickly recognized that the slave who would not sing could be a source of trouble. Slave owners also quickly assessed that the tempo of the music (the speed of the beat) and character of the music were important. The tempo made a difference in the amount of work accomplished, hence they encouraged up-tempo songs. Mournful or sorrowful songs, usually in minor keys, were discouraged since they affected mood. Work slowed and the slave could become troublesome and even dangerous. The slave owner’s emphasis on faster, cheerier, major-key music explains the dearth of sorrow songs before the Civil War. Finally, tempo cues were sometimes determined by neither the slave nor the master, but instead by the tempo of the machines used in the work, as in grinding.

The textual content and musical characteristics of the work song did not evolve solely along African lines or in a cultural vacuum. Slaves who worked in the coastal regions worked alongside newly-arrived blacks from the West Indies and immigrants from England and Ireland. The music that regulated work then came from a variety of cultures. West Indian music brought afresh African elements into slave music, and the music of the immigrants from the British Isles reinforced the initial British influence upon the slave of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Spiritual became a dominant music type during the evangelical crusades of the nineteenth century and, in some regions where the teaching of religion had been particularly successful, the spiritual texts supplanted the normal text of the work song. Throughout its history, the work song also furnished the opportunity for the slave to vent emotionally by praising or satirizing in song his master.

Loading cargo onto the river boat

“Marching” songs might also be grouped with work songs. The slave had several occasions to march. First, he marched out to labor and back to his living quarters daily. He also marched to the “big house” for his weekly rations. After the abolition of slave importation from Africa in the early nineteenth century, domestic traders often marched groups of slaves to auction, usually from the northernmost regions of the south to the Deep South. These migrations by marching were cheaper than transport by rail or water. March songs also passed into military in the late nineteenth century as blacks became soldiers. Each troop-unit, like the workers on the plantations, developed its own songs.

Dancing
Taking his cues from Christian worship practices, the plantation owner did not generally require his slaves to work on Sundays. Sunday became, then, the slave’s day for recreation, and the most common form of recreation for him was dancing. Slaves gathered on their own plantations, on a nearby one, or in a back square in a nearby town and spent the day in dance. Dancing commenced in the afternoon and often lasted late into the night.

Eyewitness accounts tell us that the music consisted of percussion furnished by a variety of instruments and music from the banjo, fiddle, and balafo. The percussion instruments ranged from tall Congo drums to bones and gourds filled with pebbles or dried corn. The accounts are consistent with the illustrations of the previous lecture.

On the islands of the West Indies and in urban squares such as Place Congo in New Orleans, the occasion of the Sunday dance called for formality of dress. Impromptu dancing on the plantation after work hours was less formal. Slave owners feared large gatherings of blacks and the potential for conspiracy, advanced and communicated, they believed, in drum messages. As a consequence, the large dance gatherings of the slave in city squares were outlawed in the eighteenth century. Place Congo is unusual because dancing, legal or not, was permitted until around 1835.

An engraving from 1779 depicts Sunday dance on Santa Domingo. Note the European formal attire.

Dancing continued on the plantation and, despite legislation against it in urban areas, reports as late as the 1860s indicate dancing continued in secret. A second feature that might have made dancing in secret more desirable was an increasing association of dancing with voodoo, especially in Deep South states such as Mississippi and Louisiana. Union army recruiters found the best places to drum up new enlistments was at these secret dances, which by 1864 were called “shindigs.”

A nineteenth-century development in dancing was called “Pattin’ Juba.” Pattin’ juba was an extension of hand clapping that incorporated the differences in sound created by slapping parts of the body other than the hands. It is not found anywhere in the Caribbean islands. It likely evolved as an answer to the implementation of legal restrictions against drumming. It served as an alternative to drums as a means to accompany dance. A typical pattern of pattin’ juba might be described:

1.) clap hands
2.) both hands to knees
3.) right hand to left shoulder
4.) left hand to right shoulder

All the while, the patter stamps time with his feet and sings. Tap dancing, some vaudeville specialty dance routines, and modern popular dancing might all have origins in pattin' juba.

Evangelical Fervor: the Spiritual
The evangelical fervor of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries changed the musical landscape, pushing British-influenced white music and African American music together once again and helping to shape many of the musical features that we recognize today as modern. The conversion of the slaves to Christianity was an absolute prerequisite to the emergence of the Spiritual, a music form that not only profoundly influenced African American music of the nineteenth century but also white music.

The evangelical movement was a Protestant one. The Anglican Church (“Episcopal” to Americans) organized the earliest attempt to save the slave’s immortal soul, but this effort actually came as incidental to the decision in the 1750s by the Church of England to strengthen its presence in the colonies of the New World. Other Protestant denominations (Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists) came to the same fervor pitch around the same time, and serious efforts began in earnest.

Eighteenth-century evangelical missionaries faced serious impediments. For one, many slave owners opposed the movement, fearing that Christian teachings of equality carried with them the danger of uprisings. Practical problems were also serious. The distance between plantations slowed effective ministry. Language barriers arose with newly-arrived Africans. The limited number of clergy was barely adequate to serve the white population, much less convert a significant slave one.

In devising effective strategies to conversion, the Anglican bishop Beilly Porteus made several far-reaching suggestions in his Essay towards a Plan for the More Effectual Civilization of the Negroe [sic] Slaves (1784). He observed that since “many Negroes have a natural turn for music… this propensity, displayed as they are heard to sing in their rude and artless way at their work,” could be used as a tool for conversion. He proposed that “short hymns set to plain, easy, and solemn psalm tunes, as nearly resembling their own simple melody as possible” might be used for instruction in church and as music for slave occasions. He further advised that great progress could be made “by mingling in their entertainments, their festivities, and amusements, and turning every little incident into an instrument of moral and religious improvement.” Concurrently and independently, many Presbyterian clergy concluded that Psalm-singing represented the most pleasant and effective way to instruct slaves.

Progress toward slave conversion made slow progress prior to 1850. The strategy to conversion was comprehensive and aimed at changing all aspects of the slaves’ lives. Camp meetings were organized for worship and instruction and slow replaced Sunday dancing. The worship at camp meetings set the precedent for later Black worship, including displays of high emotion, great zeal, and dance-induced trances. Religious dancing usually occurred after the formal service, and these were called “shouts.” Camp meetings were also organized by black religious leaders, and these meetings were often very similar to the earlier secret dances. They were held in the deep woods away from urban centers and populated areas and, most importantly, the discomfort felt under the scrutiny of white eyes.

Camp meetings organized in the late 1820s by the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist sects often lasted several days and used open fields for their sites. Ecstatic and zealous singing and dancing were typical features. The leader of the worship service was called the “exhorter.” The preaching was not as great an interest as the music, the strong rhythm, and the body motion.

Camp Meeting

White hymns were taught by “lining out,” a colonial practice of teaching hymns to musically illiterate congregations. The white hymns were dutifully sung in the presence of white clergy, but as soon as out of earshot, slaves began to graft religious texts of their own making unto the music that had evolved in the fields. The influence went both ways, however. If hymns served to convey the Western features of harmony and scales to black musicians, the emotive quality and rhythmic subtlety of black music filtered back into white music. “Amazing Grace,” a white spiritual written by a repentant former slave owner, uses a scale typical of Scottish music and a regular melodic rhythm typical of European music, but the strong emotive quality of the text and music is more akin in spirit and character to the African American spiritual than to any Protestant hymn. The black spiritual also had an impact upon white folksong of the period, and it is often impossible to tell from hearing the race or ethnicity of the author. In the end, conversion of the slave to Christianity did little to change his cultural practices and entertainments. Instead, religion merely subsumed the slave's activities and put on them a new face.