When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping
version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation
reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin'
Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues
tradition
before him. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed
by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and
responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance
of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older
than the blues, a tradition
rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa.
Bold and original, The Power of Black Music
offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and
appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving
to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it
brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old
linkage between the music,
myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring
vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of
Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr,
advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and
traditions
of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey
from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of
music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of
the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the
beboppers in
the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and
concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the
assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the
music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own
performance practices. Instead, he
recognizes European influences,
while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its
African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may
not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can
intuitively recognize links to an authentic African
cultural memory.
For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a
young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, "Inside him he'd got
the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. That's what
the memory is....When a blues is good, that kind of memory just
grows up inside it."
Grounding
his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of
black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener,
Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before
and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a
force
with the power to enrich cultures the world over.
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