Synopses & Reviews
When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues tradition before him. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues, a tradition rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa.
Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. Instead, he recognizes European influences, while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, "Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. That's what the memory is....When a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it."
Grounding his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener, Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a force with the power to enrich cultures the world over.
Review
"Diligently traces the history of Black music--its African influences and evolution."--Emerge
"Dares to take on the whole span of black musical history."--Chicago Tribune
"Important...An exceptionally erudite and thoroughly readable work."--I.S.A.M. Newsletter
"Impressive."--Booklist
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-295), discography (p. 297-304), filmography (p. 305), and index.
About the Author
"Floyd...diligently traces the history of Black music in America (the jazz of New Orleans funeral parades, blues, bebop, 1960s concert hall composers, rock)--its African influences and evolution."--
Emerge"Floyd's work shows an uncanny coordination of ear, heart, and intellect. The author brings his subject into the realm of ideas while manifesting a love for the music and respect for the people who have made it. His grasp of the continuity of ring-shout values, and of what it means to Signify musically, uncovers and explains the vital core of African-American music making more convincingly than any other account I have read."--Richard Crawford, Professor of Music, University of Michigan
"The most scholarly and imaginative exploration yet of the origins and development of black music....An invaluable contribution."--Sterling Stuckey, Professor of History and Religious Studies, University of California, Riverside
"African American music deserves but seldom gets as much attention from academics as from music critics. Floyd takes a rare scholarly approach to it and sets a standard for subsequent studies. The range of genres he discusses is comprehensive...and the connections he makes are particularly perceptive....Academics, critics, scholars, and fans alike stand to gain much from carefully reading this impressive work."--Booklist
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. African Music, Religion, and Narrative
2. Transformations
3. Syncretization and Synthesis: Folk and Written Traditions
4. African-American Modernism, Signifyin(g), and Black Music
5. The Negro Renaissance: Harlem and Chicago Flowerings
6. Transitions: Function and Difference in Myth and Ritual
7. Continuity and Discontinuity: The Fifties
8. The Sixties and After
9. Troping the Blues: From Spirituals to the COncert Hall
10. The Object of Call-Response: The Signifyin(g) Symbol
11. Implications and Conclusions
Appendix