Africa and the BluesIn 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. Gerhard Kubik is a professor in the department of ethnology and African studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. Since 1983 he has been affiliated with the Center for Social Research of Malawi, Zomba. He is a permanent member of the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London. |
Contents
Part I Out of Africa | 1 |
Part II Return to Africa | 153 |
Summary and Conclusions | 197 |
Bibliography | 205 |
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Common terms and phrases
12-bar blues 12-Bar Blues Form African Music African-American African-American music Ali Farka Toure American banjo bass blue notes blues singers Blues Tonal System Cameroon Central African central Sudanic belt cents characteristic Chicago chord concepts dance Daniel Kachamba David Evans Deep South Delta drum early equiheptatonic European example fiddle flatted fifth flute Gerhard Kubik grinding song Guinea Coast guitar guitarist Hausa heptatonic heterophony idea instruments jazz Kubik Kutin kwela language lutes Malamusi Malawi Mali mbira melisma Mississippi monochord zither musical bows musical cultures musicians Nigeria nineteenth century northern one-string one-stringed Ottenheimer partial pentatonic performance played recorded region reinterpreted Research Return to Africa rhythm savanna scalar pattern scale Senegal singing social song South Africa string structure style stylistic subdominant Sung Literary Genre technique Tere natere Tikar tions tonal center tone tonic Toure's traditions transcription tuning vocal voice west African west central Sudanic western Sudan World Yoruba