Africa and the Blues

Front Cover
Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1999 - Music - 240 pages
In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own cultural heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between these two far-flung musicians is African-American music, the sound that became the blues. Such discoveries reveal a narrative of music evolution for Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Traveling in Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States, he spent forty years in the field gathering the material for Africa and the Blues. In this book, Kubik relentlessly traces the remote genealogies of African cultural music through eighteen African nations, especially in the Western and Central Sudanic Belt. Included is a comprehensive map of this cradle of the blues, along with 31 photographs gathered in his fieldwork. The author also adds clear musical notations and descriptions of both African and African American traditions and practices and calls into question the many assumptions about which elements of the blues were "European" in origin and about which came from Africa. Unique to this book is Kubik's insight into the ways present-day African musicians have adopted and enlivened the blues with their own traditions. With scholarly care but with an ease for the general reader, Kubik proposes an entirely new theory on blue notes and their origins. Tracing what musical traits came from Africa and what mutations and mergers occurred in the Americas, he shows that the African American tradition we call the blues is truly a musical phenomenon belonging to the African cultural world [Publisher description].
 

Selected pages

Contents

1 Sources Adaptation and Innovation
5
2 The Rise of a Sung Literary Genre
21
3 A Strange Absence
51
h The West Central Sudanic Belt
63
5 Blues Recordings Compared with Material from the West Central Sudan
71
6 Some Characteristics of the Blues
82
7 Why Did a West Central Sudanic Style Cluster Prevail in the Blues?
96
8 Heterophonic Versus Homophonic Multipart Schemes
105
10 The Flatted Fifth
146
Introduction
155
II The IZBar Blues Form in South African kweh and Its Reinterpretation
161
12 Return to the Western Sudan
186
Summary and Conclusions
197
Bibliography
205
Index
225
Copyright

9 The Blues Tonal System
118

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About the author (1999)

Gerhard Kubik is one of the best-known scholars in the field of ethnomusicology and author of numerous books over a lengthy career. A cultural anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and psychoanalyst, Kubik researches music, dance, and oral traditions in Africa and the Americas. He is author of Africa and the Blues; Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I: The African Undercurrent in Twentieth-Century Jazz Culture; and Jazz Transatlantic, Volume II: Jazz Derivatives and Developments in Twentieth-Century Africa, all published by University Press of Mississippi.