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Blues dancing originated in the dances brought to America by enslaved Africans, who followed sub-Saharan African music traditions.There is no documented evidence across the history of pre-colonial sub-Saharan African dance for sustained one-on-one mixed-gender partnered dancing; African cultures apparently considered this type of dancing to be inappropriate.
The historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify Islamic music as an influence on blues music. [11] [12] Diouf notes a striking resemblance between the Islamic call to prayer (originating from Bilal ibn Rabah, a famous Abyssinian African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century field holler music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note ...
Some [which?] scholars and ethnomusicologists have speculated that the origins of the blues can be traced to the musical traditions of Africa, as retained by African-Americans during and after slavery. [2] Even though the blues is a key component of American popular music, its rural, African-American origins are largely undocumented, and its ...
Blues People: Negro Music in White America is a seminal study of Afro-American music (and culture generally) by Amiri Baraka, who published it as LeRoi Jones in 1963. [1] In Blues People Baraka explores the possibility that the history of black Americans can be traced through the evolution of their music.
The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the African-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery, with the development of juke joints occurring later. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves.
The slave trade involved the capture and enslavement of free African peoples of which a majority were brought to the Americas. [2] As the descendants of an enslaved population, music provided African Americans with an opportunity to experience the idea of freedom before it became a reality with the passing of the 14th Amendment in 1868. [3]
As people were taken from Africa to be sold as slaves, especially starting in the 1500s, they brought their dance styles with them. Entire cultures were imported into the New World, especially those areas where slaves were given more flexibility to continue their cultures and where there were more African slaves than Europeans or indigenous Americans, such as Brazil.
She attributes the origins of field holler music to African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America. According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma , wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Arabic - Islamic ...