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- Jews, screws, de fi dum: about music by the Lords of Sound

Posted on August 23rd, 2011

The story is well known, even outside the circle of blues lovers: Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903, W.C. Handy waits in the station on his train heading (presumably) to Clarksdale. His train was several hours late and he tried to catch some shuteye when he noticed that a lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plucking a guitar beside him while he slept. The man pressed a knife on the strings of a guitar in a manner that Handy thought was inspired by Hawaiian steel bar guitarists. His song Goin where the Southern cross the Dog struck him instantly. It was, according to W.C. Handy, the weirdest music he had ever heard. The effect as unforgettable. A similar reaction must have been expressed by Ma Rainey one of the earliest American professional blues singers and billed as Mother of the Blues when she was confronted, as she claims, with the blues for the first time around 1902. Musicologist John Work wrote about it in 1940: She tells of a girl from the town, who came to the tent one morning and began to sing about the man who had left her. The song was so strange and poignant that it attracted much attention. These reactions are reminiscent of those which were recorded by whites many decades earlier when they were confronted for the first time with the music performed by the slaves when they arrived on the American continent. To many, it was even a profound cultural shock. In the New York Weekly Journal of 1736 a reporter of a slave festival describes a cacaphony of musical sound, which was enough to raise ones hair on end (White & White, 2005). Common words in most of the reports on slave gatherings and dances were weird, strange, dramatic, heterogeneous, and sometimes even hideous and savage. Each type of reaction illustrates the difficulty that we have when we hear for the first time sounds that fall outside of what we are accustomed to. We are raised in a particular cultural paradigm which impregnates us with a certain way of interpreting and structuring sound along the basic characteristics of melody, harmony and rhythm. Harmony is in the eye of the beholder. In our Western-European culture we are for instance very sensitive to the consonancy of groups of notes. Our popular musical culture is based upon an appreciation of relatively simple harmonic structures avoiding any dissonance. In our perspective, music is meant to be of a simple, common time structure with four beats to a measure and where each quarter note gets one beat. Single metrical schemes dominate the European musical stage. One of the key elements that must have struck the white observers of African American slave music was probably the joining of two or more rhythms into polyrhythm. The complex and sophisticated patterns of polyphony and polyrhythm that characterise African music,

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with a dominance of percussion, must indeed have sounded very weird to the ears used to simpler harmonic and linear sonic compositions. Most probably, the overlapping call-andresponse patterns and the practice of melisma, i.e. the singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession, must also have disconcerted the white ears accustomed to syllabic ways of singing, though the use of melisma is also present in the Western-European sound-scape as for instance in the Gregorian chants. My point is that for a better understanding of the emergence of the blues in the latest part of the 1800s we should at least try to make an effort to listen behind the sonic curtain that has been woven by the early blues in their very first recordings. I am convinced that it can be illuminating to go even at the backstage of the first American music business of the (black face) minstrelsy. Musical genres grow in a highly dynamic flow of a complex array of socio-economic and cultural conditions which deserve our attention. Going back to the origin of this flow will allow us to feel again a bit of the astonishment as it was felt by those early observers in the 17th and 18th century. Our quest for knowledge ends when we stop loosing astonishment. This sonic exploratory quest is of course no easy matter and there are many pitfalls that can lead us to draw too hasty conclusions in the light of our actual experiences. There are no direct sonic records of that foggy period that started in those first decades of the 17th century. We can only rely on written records of the early audience whose main aim was not to leave reliable documents for future generations. It is in the human nature to note in the first place what is deviant from what we consider as normal, so by no means those early registers can be considered as an exhaustive depiction of the sonic texture of their environment. Moreover, the transcription into words of their aural experiences are to be understood with the utmost prudence as their mode of translating into words the sounds they heard is already culturally biased. Let us finally not forget that those transcriptions are mostly the product of the astonishment by white ears.

Yet, as White & White have shown in their study the Sounds of Slavery (2005), it can be most illuminating to tune in to those early sounds, despite the shortcomings of the sources. There are at our disposal an important number of written documents which allow some eavesdropping on the sounds that reverberated on the plains of the southern plantations or on the feet of the Appalachians. With no other disturbing sounds present, the rhythmic waves of work songs and the moaning of field hollers must have had a most penetrating effect. During hot dark evenings, the gathering of slaves between their cabins after their backbreaking day of labour (euphemism) cannot went other than unnoticed. The Federal Writers project of the WPA (Works Progress Administration: a relief measure established in 1935 in reaction to the economic depression The Federal Writers Project or was one of the projects intended to fund written work and support writers during the Great Depression) has produced a detailed narrative of this important antebellum period through the stories told by children of ex-slaves. Of course, here also, prudence is mandatory with this second hand information. Time always leaves its traces on the way we memorize the past. Another significant, closer to the source, well documented survey comes to us through the report of an

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- Jews, screws, de fi dum: about music by the Lords of Sound | MyBlues

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official party organised in May 1865 by President Andrew Johnson on the Saint Helena Island. Saint Helena Island, off the South Carolina coast, where the African Americans made up the largest part of the population, witnessed that month as part of that official party a large gathering at the islands main church where the celebrations took place. White & White tell the story of a white woman who interviews a recently freed slave, Jenny, about the content of an African American preachers words, and who starts singing a hymn that she learnt there: I hears a rumblin in de skies Jews, screws de fi dum! I hears a rumblin in de skies Jews, screws de fi dum! Jenny could not explain precisely what she meant by the chorus Jews, screws de fi dum!, but strongly underlined that the words were essential to the chorus. The meaning in itself was obviously less important: the main function of the chorus response was not to make sense () but to base the song, to provide a stable foundation against which the lyrical, melodic, and rhythmic improvisations of the caller would be set (p. 33). Only later, the woman who interviewed Jenny find out that the chorus she heard was a recast of the sentence: Jews crucified him. This is more than an amusing anecdote. It illustrates that as part of the large acculturation process by which African Americans got acquainted with the English language, they probably also integrated fragments of white hymns in their call-and-response formatted hymns. It points already to an early intermingling of African and European cultural and musical elements. It also sketches another characteristic of the early African American musical (hymn) textbook: the mixture or sampling of different elements which for otherwise culturally trained ears seem incongruent. A contemporary, Thomas W. Higginson (1823 1911) , an American Unitarian minister, author and soldier, active in the American Abolitionism movement during the 1840s and 1850s, expressed it as follows : for all the songs, but especially for their own wild hymns, they constantly improvised simple verses, with the same odd mingling, the little facts of to-days march being interwoven with the depth of theological gloom, and the same jubilant chorus annexed to all. This patchwork has been compared with the way that African women combine in their clothes seemingly incongruent pieces of textile in colours which in our western perspective seem to clash. This mixing is not a result of a bricolage of remains but a deliberate composition.

The integration and combination into their musical productions of all kind of different elements and little facts of live, shouldnt come as a surprise. It has been widely documented that African music is to be

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comprehended in the first place as an integral aspect of the daily life. Sounds are an essential dimension of societies which are oral, and wherein sound should be seen as part of the social language, i.e. as a means of communication. Music is considered as a part of the daily ritual and meaning, rather than as a separated, isolated artistic space (Tracy, 1999). And sometimes, some songs were even more than a form of communication. Hollers for instance were also reported to be used as a means for measure. In an interview conducted during the above mentioned WPA project, an ex-slave reported in one of his stories about a wagon leaving his plantation until it got outer hearing when it had travelled about a holler and a half. Music and its terminology was thus very functional. The comprehension and appreciation of those sounds thus need to start with the understanding of the social fabric from which they deduct their meaning. Music is not made for arts sake; it is a manner by which messages are conveyed, messages between individuals, and between individuals and the group. Their music was an exclusively communal event that could not be understood without discerning at the same time the social context. If whites heard in the first place heterophony and were flabbergasted by their songs, this was also due not only to their lack of familiarity with the way the African Americans conceived harmony, melody and rhythm but also to a lack of understanding of their social life. Whatever way the whites interpreted the music of the African American population, the sounds produced by the latter were an element of the environment which could all but being ignored. I try to imagine myself present on a hot summer evening on those sweltering Mississippi plains; it is pitch dark and the only light is coming from the moon. Besides the sounds of nature, the only sound which can be heard is that of the slaves who gather between their cabins and sing their native songs which echo through the heat. It would be hard to disprove that the acculturation process that took place in those early decades after the importation of slaves was not both sides. Just as the African Americans slowly incorporated English in their language and derived sound components from what they heard from their masters, it would be hard to dismiss that the whites were not influenced by the sounds which perhaps in the beginning sounded weird, but which became gradually a permanent component of their sonic environment. There are even documents which testify that the attitude taken by the whites was not solely negative, but that some were intrigued and took at least an ambivalent position. In his Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South, 1992, the anthropologist Roger D. Abrahams asserts that sometimes the slave-owners encouraged their slaves to play, providing them with the instruments. Over time, more and more plantation owners came to enjoy the sounds of slave music and dance, and increasingly managed to do so without (a) sense of repugnance or foreboding. (White & White, p. 51). He annotates that this allowed them to have a glimpse into what whites considered to be exotic. A similar interest in black music by whites was observed by Marian Harland (1830-1922), a writer of a.o. novels and travel narratives whose career stretched a great deal around the Civil War. She narrated about what were called the Amen benches, at the left of the pulpit in the First African Baptist Church in Richmond (1850), and which were reserved for white auditors. The benches were always full, she reported. What can we infer from this preliminary reading of literature on what Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), American folklorist and anthropologist, called the music of the lords of sound? Well, a first thought that crossed my mind all along the reading was, whether it is appropriate to call it even music. I believe that even the use of the word music already carries the risk of putting us on the wrong leg when we try to understand what their sounds were all about.

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- Jews, screws, de fi dum: about music by the Lords of Sound | MyBlues

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The danger in the use of the word music is that we immediately associate it with our present day conception of it, as it comes to us through radio, television, the internet and all other digital media. Through our western cultural training, music has come to carry some characteristics in our minds which are not suitable for entering the sonic cosmos of the early days of slavery. Let me be clear on this, to avoid any misunderstanding: this thought carries no demeaning intention, quite the opposite. It is my strong conviction that music is too narrow a word to even try to comprehend the large realm of meaning that sound had for the black population. My reflexion is to be interpreted as an expression of utmost respect. Did you know by the way that the languages of many cultures all over the world do not even include a word for what could be translated as music or that it covers only partial aspects of what we call music? It is no coincidence that this is the case for quite a number of African cultures. I will need to analyse this further of course in the context of my next articles, but it is already clear that the sounds of slavery, need to be understood in the first place as a functional component in the total social context of all daily and occasional events. To paraphrase Carmen McRae, who said that blues is to jazz as is wheat to bread, I would dare to say that sounds were to the slave community as wheat is to bread. No doubt, this functionality is one of the aspects that we will see reflected later on in the emergence of the blues, which served likewise as a vehicle by which their performers would look to find self-respect and express both pain and joy as a social group. A second thought which was present in the back of my mind was that, how different the European and African traditions (at first sight) were, the conditions were present for a musical cross-pollination. Both Europeans and Africans arrived on the American continent with their own cultural background and they had no other option than to adapt to their new environment of which the other population was a constituent part. Of course, their relationship was totally asymmetrical (an euphemism for brutal exploitation), but at the end of the day there grew an economic interdependency. The cultural outcome of it was eventually more than the sum of one and one, it was another culture, a reality sui generis. Their musical backgrounds would merge into new musical genres which would have never existed if whites and blacks wouldnt have met on the American continent. Stay tuned for further eavesdropping into the sounds of slavery in articles to come in the next couple of weeks. To ease the pain of waiting until their publication, I give you a quote from Richard Waterman (1952) to reflect upon: The outstanding feature of African music which sets it most apart from that of Europe is the rhythm. () As Herskovits has written: for the African, the most important thing about rhythm is to have it, regardless of how it is produced. African rhythms have been spoken of as incredible and incomprehensible to us. While this may be rejected as the counsel of defeat, it is undoubtedly true that the appreciation of African rhythms requires the development of a musical sense that, in the individual conditioned only to the norms of European music, usually lies somewhat dormant.

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Sources : - http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Harland_Marion_1830-1922 - Steven C. Tracy, ed., Write me a few of your lines, A Blues Reader, 1999 - Roger D. Abrahams. Singing the Master: The Emergence of AfricanAmerican Culture in the Plantation South.,1992. - Shane White & Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery, 2005 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Writers%27_Project - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wentworth_Higginson - http://jasobrecht.com/ma-rainey-the-mother-of-the-blues/ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_music - http://audio.tutsplus.com/articles/general/introduction-to-polyrhythms/ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Africa

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The Blues Report For August 24, 2011 | Songcography.com says:
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