A Second Diaspora: The Deep South

By the 1750s, the musical landscape of the British North American colonies was much different from that in the rest of the Americas. Along with the radical impact of the Stono rebellion, another phenomenon particular to the United States was soon to give African American music its unique form. The 1800s saw an unprecedented forced migration of enslaved people to the Deep South. Between 1790 and 1865, the domestic slave trade sent more than a million Africans and African Americans from the Upper South on forced journeys to Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. They were “sold down the river,” or they migrated along with their owners to the new cotton and sugar lands.24

The Deep South was peopled with men, women, and children who had been brutally uprooted and separated from their families, with no hope of ever reuniting. It was a traumatic experience akin to what Africans had endured when originally forced to part from their loved ones and communities. The new arrivals had to carve cotton or sugar plantations out of the forests, a back-breaking kind of work. Artisans who had acquired diverse skills in the Upper South were now sent to work in the fields, cutting cane and hoeing and picking cotton. The task system that in some regions had allowed people to work for themselves and cultivate gardens after their allotted daily workload was finished did not exist. Because of the distance, runaways to the free states were overwhelmingly from the Upper South (mostly Maryland and Virginia); the men, women, and children taken farther south had no hope of ever crossing the Mason-Dixon line. Worse, the extreme work regime rested on the use of such brutality that it amounted to torture. “Those who had seen and experienced torture in the southeastern and southwestern regions,” stressed historian Edward Baptist, “universally insisted it was worse on the southwestern plantations.”25

In this inhuman, dismal, devastating environment, the communal song and dance traditions may not have been appealing. In addition, the sight of a man singing solo was undoubtedly less alarming to white people than were large gatherings of people dancing to the drumlike beat of rattles and buckets. The Sahelian musical style had a better chance of taking root because its solo, non-instrumental tradition, which had already been easier to preserve farther north, responded better to the social and psychological situation in which people found themselves. This does not mean that most arrivals to the Deep South were Muslims or Muslim descendants. As Kubik argues,

[We cannot know] whether a majority of the ancestors of those who created and perpetuated the blues originally came from places like Senegal, Mali, northern Ghana, northern Togo, northern Nigeria and northern Cameroon. But that is of only peripheral importance, because others could have quickly learned from those who did come from there. Shared with others, their style could prevail. Under the circumstances of farm life in the nineteenth-century Deep South, one style cluster, with modifications, began to dominate, resulting in (among other things) the eventual development of the blues. Other style clusters were relegated to the background, retaining their potential for a breakthrough at some future opportunity.26

The Holler

One style that emerged in the Deep South was the holler. Traveler and author Frederick Law Olmsted heard a man in South Carolina, in 1853, raising a “long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into falsetto his voice ringing through the woods in the clear, frosty night air, like a bugle call.”27 What he described also caught the attention of Harvard archeologist Charles Peabody, working in 1901 and 1902 in Coahoma County in the Mississippi Delta. The men he had hired on-site, fifteen miles from Clarksdale, had a particular way of singing that was different from the way the group of men he had brought from the city sang. One local man in particular sang what was “apparently genuine African music, sometimes with words, sometimes without.”

Long phrases there were without apparent measured rhythm, singularly hard to copy in notes. When such sung by him and by others could be reduced to form, a few motives were made to appear, and these copied out were usually quite simple, based for the most part on the major or minor triad. The long, lonely sing-song of the fields was quite distinct from anything else, though the singer was skillful in gliding from hymn motives to those of the native chant.28

In 1940, the African American scholar John W. Work III, who did extensive field work in the Delta and compiled 230 items for his American Negro Songs and Spirituals, described the holler as “a fragmentary bit of yodel, half sung, half yelled,” adding that the genre had “the slow time melancholy type of tune, the characteristic cadence.”29 Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and his father, John, recorded numerous hollers in the 1930s and 1940s and found they shared distinctive features:

They are solos, slow in tempo, free in rhythm (as opposed to the gang work songs), composed of long, gliding, ornamented and melismatic phrases, given a melancholy character by minor intervals as well as by blued or bent tones, sounding like sobs or moans or keening or pain-filled cries, even when they were performed with such bravura that they resounded across the fields. 30

The holler was at the antipodes of the call-and-response, participative work song. As Work stated, “The ‘holler’ is in decided contrast to the first type of work song in which the rhythmic factor is uppermost in importance. It has no group significance.”31 “Cornfield Holler,” by Thomas J. Marshall, recorded in 1939 in Mississippi, is a perfect example of this genre, with its solo, melancholic tune, elongated words, and melisma.

Oooooh, Oooooh

I won’t be here long.

Oooooh, Oooooh

Oh, dark gonna catch me here,

Dark gonna catch me here.

Ooooooh, Oooooh32

Hollers were often three-line songs, but some had many more verses. Examples of longer hollers can be found in Horace Sprott’s recordings. Born on an Alabama plantation in the 1890s, he learned to sing from his parents, grandparents, and other elders. His field holler “My Little Annie, So Sweet,” recorded in situ—one can hear birds chirping—features the traditional waves, vibrato, and pauses.

Post-Emancipation and the Birth of the Blues

After six decades of research in hollers and early blues, Lomax contended, “American blacks called upon ancient African resources, for complaints of this type existed in the tradition of African kingdoms.”33 He stressed that what he called “the high lonesome complaint” was common in West and North Africa, the southern Mediterranean, and the Middle East; this, he concluded, in America gave rise to the blues.

This rise originated in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. James Smethurst, a scholar of African American culture, reminds us that “the blues was essentially created by the first generation of African Americans who did not directly experience slavery as adults and yet who came of age as many of the hopes brought by Emancipation failed.”34 Reconstruction (1865–1877), a time of high expectation for the black population but also of violence, was followed by Jim Crow and its cortege of lethal brutality. The blues, in its original-country form, developed in the context of what can be called Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II, to borrow Douglas A. Blackmon’s book title. Sharecropping, peonage, lynching, chain gangs, terror, and forced labor were not conducive to the birth of a joyous musical style. The young rural creators of the blues grew up in a secular musical world dominated by the hollers, and this style permeated their new music. Music historian and critic Ted Gioia notes, “One sometimes is hard-pressed to say where the field holler ends and the blues begins.”35 Such is the case, for instance, with the blues “Sun Going Down” by Eddie James “Son” House Jr., with its melisma, vibrato, humming, and long pauses. Moreover, West Africa’s sounds were still familiar. A blues sung by Tangle Eye, an inmate at the notorious Parchman prison farm in Mississippi, was said to have “a virtual match in Senegal.” Hearing both tunes side by side convinced Lomax that “Tangle Eye’s forebears must have come from Senegal bringing this song style with them.”36

Instrumental Blues Style

In addition to the singing style, the instrumental dimension of the blues presents certain traits that some musicologists attribute to western Sahel. According to John Storm Roberts,

The parallels between African savanna-belt string-playing and the techniques of many blues guitarists are remarkable. The big kora of Senegal and Guinea are played in a rhythmic-melodic style that uses constantly changing rhythms, often providing a ground bass overlaid with complex treble patterns, while vocal supplies a third rhythmic layer. Similar techniques can be found in hundreds of blues records. 37

But not all African-derived features of the blues can be traced back to this region. Kubik has outlined the areas from which he thinks other elements may come. The “intensity zone of monochord zithers and slider technique”—what became the slide guitar—can be found, he states, from southern Benin to Congo. And “areas with mouth-bows played with the stave directed towards the player’s lips”—the American diddley bow and mouth-bow—are prevalent in Angola and Mozambique.38 In addition, Gioia proposes the interesting hypothesis that the repetition of the first line in many blues is an adaptation of call-and-response, the solo singer providing both the call and the response.39

Islamic Practices and the Blues

Musicologists such as Lomax, Kubik, Charters, Oliver, and others who found the roots of the blues in the West African Islamic belt envisioned this lineage as musical styles brought over by musicians. What they did not see is a direct link with specific Islamic practices that survived in the Americas, such as prayers, the recitation of the Qur’an, Sufi chants, and the call to prayer.

In Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, I have shown that Muslims continued to adhere, as best they could, given the circumstances, to their religion, its precepts, and its practices. Prayers, fasting, dietary restrictions, charity, literacy, and dress, for example, endured, secretly or openly. Slaveholders, travelers, and writers, as well as enslaved non-Muslims, witnessed and reported some of these manifestations of religious piety, without necessarily understanding them as such.

An incident that took place in Sierra Leone in the late 1780s illustrates what most likely occurred on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean:

In the neighboring slave-yard, I saw a man about 35 years old in irons. He was a Mahometan, and could read and write Arabick. He was occasionally noisy; sometimes he would sing a melancholy song then he would utter an earnest prayer, and then would observe a dead silence.40

The melancholy song may have been the musical recitation of the Qur’an or a Sufi chant: the young man calling on his faith’s oral expression to assuage his despair. On American farms and plantations, Qur’anic recitations and Sufi chants, done solo or in small groups, would have sounded just like songs. And so too would the call to prayer, the adhan. The words of the adhan are the same everywhere, but each call has a distinctive sound, characteristic of each place. It will sound different in, say, Uzbekistan and Senegal. Perhaps the most striking holler in that regard came from Bama, the star singer of Parchman prison. Like the adhan, his “Levee Camp Holler,” recorded by Lomax as late as 1947—a sign of the genre’s longevity—could have floated from a minaret. It is almost an exact match to the call to prayer by a West African muezzin. It features the same ornamented notes, elongated syllables sung with wavy intonations, melismas, and pauses. When both pieces are juxtaposed, it is hard to distinguish when the call to prayer ends and the holler starts. It was most likely these audible expressions of Muslim faith, and not merely what the musicians brought over, that generated the distinctive African American music of the South.41

The blues is generally understood as a secular music of loss: lost women, lost jobs, regrets, and defeat. But it has a more profound, spiritual side: defying despair. In the 1950s, Ralph Ellison, while writing about flamenco—another Islamic-influenced music—remarked that the “blues voice mocks the despair stated explicitly in the lyric, and it expresses the great human joke directed against the universe, that joke which is the secret of all folklore and myth: that though we be dismembered daily we shall always rise up again.”42For theologian James Cone, the blues is “a secular spiritual."43 In this spirituality, perhaps one may find an echo of one of the blues’s roots in Islamic practices and music.

The blues is not African music; there is no traditional “African blues.” Nor is it “Islamic music.” The blues is an African American creation, born of American circumstances and various influences. What makes it unique is the prevalence of a number of Sahelian/Islamic stylistic elements that became dominant due in part to historical events particular to American slavery. One, the Stono uprising, was an attack on the system in the pursuit of freedom. Another, the uprooting of a million people, was engineered to feed the monstrously violent development of slavery in the Deep South. Still another was the virtual re-enslavement of the post-Emancipation period. To resist the onslaught of these cruel historical circumstances, African Americans used all the cultural tools that best allowed them to express their suffering and hope, to comfort themselves, and to help them cope. Among these were the soulful tunes of the hollers and the blues. Though largely unrecognized, they are some of the most enduring contributions of West African Muslims to American culture.