Art Bouman

Country Blues: Complicating American Roots Music

Part 1: Africa in America

There is a pervasive myth about Africans of the diaspora whose ancestors were brought over in chains and it goes something like this. The Africans who were brought here as chattel lost their language, their culture, and no vestiges of their African heritage remain. It is claimed that heritage had little to know effect on the new American culture. And while it’s true that I cannot nor can many of my people speak Twi, or Akan, or any of the languages of our forebearers, when we look to music, we see that American music is rooted in our African heritage. Every type of music from Blues, Hip-hop, Calypso, Cumbia, Rock and Jazz are evolutions of the music that African’s brought to this hemisphere. Even what would today be considered “white music” like country music has roots in the African tradition. The banjo, which is a quintessential American instrument, was developed by slaves in the Caribbean out of remembrances of their lost homelands. Until the turn of the 20th century, banjo was almost exclusively played by African Americans, and it remains a part of the folk traditions of the Greater Antilles to this day. In this, part one of the project, I would like to explore, reclaim and pay homage to those songs which were played by my people as part of their vernacular folk. 

The first two songs “Reuben” and “Old Corn Likker” are improvisational tunes that were meant to be played as accompaniment to dances. These songs were not meant to be played for two or three minutes, but for as long as a given dance lasted -- which could have been up to 20 or 40 minutes. To this day the lyrics are not standardized and variation on the simplistic repetitive melodies are encouraged. 

It is not widely known, but the square dance evolved from the group dances that African’s would hold in the brief moments between work days on the plantation. In later centuries, within African communities, this music and dance were called “breakdowns,” and they were the precursor to blues and juke joints. To rich white planters in the 18th century these dances were often considered lewd, primitive and controversial, but in the 20th century Henry Ford appropriated and formalized this style of dance and promoted it as tradition which reinforced his idea of “White American culture.” Ford was also an avowed racist and anti-Semite so I hope the irony of this isn’t lost on the reader. 

“Boatman” sometimes called “The Boatman Dance” was a minstrel tune, but it is a song with an interesting past. Blackface minstrelsy is a well-known “Jim Crow Era” entertainment form. Today its seen rightly as a form of music which seeks to degrade and stereotype African Americans. The song the boatman however was a song that recounted a story of covert resistance during the Underground Railroad. Free black boatmen, steamboat workers who transported people and goods north and south on rivers during the tail end of slavery, would transmit messages and news between families still enslaved in the south and free black people in the north. The lines I sing “Boatman dance, boatman sing, boatman knows everything,” subtly informs the viewer who they can trust to send and receive their vital information. 

“Take this Hammer,” “John Henry,” and “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” all are songs that developed out of the post-civil war African experience. John Henry especially, aside from being a real person who did work and die while helping to build the railroad, is an archetype for the condition of black working-class people through the turn of the 20th century.

Black railroad workers often came from jails are were leased by the jails to various railroad companies. In this indentured role, black workers rarely received any type of compensation, and were discarded or sent back to jail, after the infrastructure projects were completed. Much like today, criminalized black people represented a free pool of labor for early white American venture capitalists. John Henry as a folk figure looms large, because he represents the collective resilience of a people forced into a struggle they cannot win. The song “Take this Hammer” is a response to the story of John Henry. It retells the story of a black railway worker who refuses the indignity of his working condition. He refuses to be chained and live off nothing but “cornbread and molasses” because to paraphrase the song, it hurts his pride. He would rather run to freedom than end up killed by the very implements which laid John Henry low.

To this day African American music is often caricatured. It is often seen by white people as being shallow, unserious and foolish, but as I hope I have shown these songs tell the story of our history, and they convey the deepest emotions, hopes and desires of our ancestors. What often makes white imitations of black music seem so terrible, is that they miss what is just under the superficial surface of the music. They think nothing of the depth of meaning that lie in the words and sounds. The concepts within our music haven’t really changed that much. They still express a desire for freedom, the necessity of resilience, and the reality of our resistance, and it can still be found if our digs a little deeper under the surface of these; our songs. The way I seek to complicate the root of American Music, is to show that even within a music which has largely appropriated by white American players and listeners, the music itself is rooted in African culture and recounts in an intimate way the African American experience.

Part 2: A Hard Times Politics

For further reading, What Islam Gave the Blues by historian Sylviane A. Diouf