Whenever I walk onto a stage or a pulpit, everyone knows its time to make music. Where my music lives is a sacred place for transforming lives and stations. Where my music takes me is a journey to purpose and power. I want you to come and go with me to that land.
What we hear and what we feel is what we know. Give yourself the freedom to feel the music and hear the music from inside. Take note of your impulsive reactions to sound. Then let those sounds and those feelings take you deeper and deeper still until they become second nature, until they become inseparable from your very breath. Give yourself license to let music move you. Then and only then will you be in the company of African-American song styles.
When I say let the music move you, it is not always an action that I refer to but a concept, a way of creating your own relationship with what you hear and what you feel.
We Black people believe that music makes us superhuman and bestows upon us special powers. We are a people who did not want to leave our homeland of Africa. Therefore, all Black music is under the umbrella of protest music. We are a rich African-based culture rooted in ritual and tradition, supported and maintained in our communities. We have evolved from African to American; our roots in Africa, our branches in America. Black music is at once social, recreational and functional, blurring the lines between individual and social behavior and the all-encompassing ART!
The first musics of these African people in the English language are spirituals – the sacred text – and blues – the secular text. Spirituals come from the heart of the Negro slave as forceful outflowings of religious passion. They were the music of the pre-Civil War "invisible" church (no buildings for us) in this preliterate era fed by the oral tradition. We gathered in fields and woods when it was safe. Church was an everyday occurrence; not weekly. These Negro spirituals were influenced by the surrounding conditions of negativity and degradation and, miraculously, a body of over 6,000 independent spirituals exist today, melodies handed down from generation to generation. They speak of life and death, suffering and sorrow, exile and trouble, strife and hiding, love and judgment, grace and hope, justice and mercy. They grope for some unseen power and sigh for rest in the end. The slaves were not simply singing a song, they were stating a point of view: that the God of justice is on the side of the oppressed. Regarded as heathens and made to worship the slavemaster's God, our animist religions were seen a primitive nonsense.
Harmony was never taught or encouraged…it was expressed as the spirit moved you. The harmonic systems in those days came directly from the African chants and melodies and yearnings for the old world. We created complex rhythms and elaborate harmonic systems unrecognizable to Western ears. Neither had these ears witnessed the use of 2 or 3 separate rhythmic patterns to underscore melody. The diversity in the sound was also evident in the singer's interpretation. The tense, slightly hoarse-sounding vocal technique of work songs and blues stem directly from African chants.
The blues are the storytelling of the community. There was no secular life for a slave so the early blues was a solo form that grew to be accompanied by the guitar. Most times improvised on the spot, these songs would go on for hours and hours if it was safe. It is important to note the banjo and xylophone were brought over to these shores by African slaves and taken away from us–just like our drums – by the slavemasters. We created the blues form to talk about our life in America in our own language. We created our own instruments from washboards, tin cans, empty oil drums, anything! We created our own rhythms by striking our very bodies, hand claps, spoons and sticks. The master would sometimes let us do our jigs and sing our songs because they wanted to believe it made us happy to be slaves, never realizing it was this very music that was saving our lives and giving us strength to press on. The intensity of African dance has never dimished but continues to morph into one after another means of expressing our African roots and our American situation. Our way was paved by adaptation and reinterpretation.
Music made by Black Americans must speak to the people, go to the people, involve the people and ultimately change the people. African-American music has always drawn from everything the world has to offer. We are lovers and prone to finding the good in everything that comes our way. Music can save your life if you let it. Don't be satisfied being a listener. Participate, dance, sing, hum, clap, stomp, scream, be moved by. And then use music to get you to the next best place.
