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.
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