Considering their tiny population are Jamaicans the most influential people ever?

[Elle Driver]

...almost forgot that negro spirituals were spread all over europe and in africa in the 1870s/1880's

 

[K.O.N.Y]

...almost forgot that negro spirituals were spread all over europe and in africa in the 1870s/1880's

They started off singing cac/european christian music
Than 86'd that and started doing the spirituals, the music of our culture
Cacs never heard no shyt like that before so the music spread nationwide and international
Dudes really performed AAfram negro spirituals in the royal court of Queen victoria

*Also i thought the African gospel/N.spiritual influence came much later*

 

[MikeyC]

When you don't have to join the war because your comrades have destroyed the enemy =

If you mean boring us half to death with unnecessary images of ancient text and citing wikipedia articles as facts as "destroying the enemy", then yes they slaughtered us.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

If you mean boring us half to death with unnecessary images of ancient text and citing wikipedia articles as facts as "destroying the enemy", then yes they slaughtered us.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Edmund Havel. Jubilee Singers at the Court of Queen Victoria, 1873. Fisk University Library.

This portrait commemorates the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ performance before Queen Victoria. Painted in 1873 by Edmund Havel, the queen’s court painter, it depicts, left to right (men): Benjamin Holmes, Isaac dikkerson, Thomas Rutling, Edmund Watkins; left to right (women): Mabel Lewis, Minnie Tate, Ella Sheppard, Jennie Jackson, Julia Jackson, Maggie Porter, Georgia Gordon.

 

[Elle Driver]

When people try to say AA have no culture when y'all just don't know our culture lol y'all don't understand when we be speaking that real real AAVE. Or rituals we practice, even simple deep southern culture. Only AA could relate to the imagery Beyoncé was using. I think they're just mad we practice exclusivity when they feel like they should be apart of us. I grew up with a country pops, sometimes I put on his accent just so people don't understand what I'm saying. AA is the culture and if you know you know. It's not soul food and grits, it's traditions and rituals only we get and it's something so pure we pass it down from each generation.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

They started off singing cac/european christian music
Than 86'd that and started doing the spirituals, the music of our culture
Cacs never heard no shyt like that before so the music spread nationwide and international

cacs were like

Dudes really performed AAfram negro spirituals in the royal court of Queen victoria

*Also i thought the African gospel/N.spiritual influence came much later*

negro spirtuals were around since the 1600's/1700's, modern Gospel is the descendant of that mixed with Blues/Jazz

 

[IllmaticDelta]

If you mean boring us half to death with unnecessary images of ancient text and citing wikipedia articles as facts as "destroying the enemy", then yes they slaughtered us.

what really happened

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America

Dark Midnight When I Rise tells the story of a troupe of young ex-slaves and freedmen whose odyssey from cotton field and auction block to concert stage and throne room is one of the most remarkable trajectories in American history. Singing the sacred hymns of their ancestors, the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduced the world to African American music. They enchanted such luminaries as Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Queen Victoria, and Prime Minister William Gladstone, and demonstrated to millions of white Americans and Europeans the courage, dignity, and intelligence of African Americans.

The Jubilees set out in the fall of 1871 to raise money for Nashville's nearly bankrupt Fisk University, one of many black schools established after the Civil War to teach reading and writing to the tens of thousands of emancipated slaves who clamored for an education. Ejected from hotels and railroad cars, shivering in the winter cold, the bedraggled singers performed along the route of the old Underground Railway to Brooklyn, where, a few days before Christmas, they sang for Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church congregation. They caused such a sensation that soon they were raising thousands of dollars a week performing to overflow audiences up and down the Eastern Seaboard. After tours of Great Britain, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany, they not only rescued Fisk but built it into one of the nation's preeminent African American institutions of higher learning.

The Jubilees introduced scores of spirituals, from "Steal Away" to "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," with such soulful artistry they moved throngs to tears. But their contribution extended beyond their music. Forced to do daily battle with American racism in the dark midnight of Reconstruction, they bravely denounced segregation from choir lofts and concert stages, forcing the issue of discrimination onto the world's front pages. In their wake, Northern hotels, railroads, and schools opened their doors to blacks.

Their success came at great cost. The eloquent Benjamin Holmes, who had taught himself to read as a slave, died of tuberculosis. Pious Julia Jackson, who as a small girl had helped her relatives escape from bondage, suffered a paralytic stroke. Frail, stalwart Ella Sheppard, the matriarch of the Jubilees, nearly died of pneumonia after seven years of unceasing toil. As they struggled to overcome exploitation and prejudice, the Jubilees transformed American music forever, foreshadowing the triumphs and travails of thousands of black performers.

Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America

 

[BigMan]

When people try to say AA have no culture when y'all just don't know our culture lol y'all don't understand when we be speaking that real real AAVE. Or rituals we practice, even simple deep southern culture. Only AA could relate to the imagery Beyoncé was using. I think they're just mad we practice exclusivity when they feel like they should be apart of us. I grew up with a country pops, sometimes I put on his accent just so people don't understand what I'm saying. AA is the culture and if you know you know. It's not soul food and grits, it's traditions and rituals only we get and it's something so pure we pass it down from each generation.

I'm sorry this is ridiculous now

Dont take this as a personal attack

 

[IllmaticDelta]

to truly understand the scale of influence of afram fashion, I think one should start from the 1920's jazz ages

peak Jazz fashion influence is 1920-1960's

Billie Holliday single handedly made this look iconic from a Jazz fashion angle

Beauty Flashback: Billie Holiday's flower-filled hair

Widely renowned as one of the greatest jazz vocalists of all time, Billie Holiday had a stunning voice, whose smoky tones and raw emotion still cause a pricking at the back of the eyes and a lump in your throat nearly seventy years on.

Holiday complemented her showstopping stage performances with a standout trademark beauty look - white gardenias pinned in her hair. What a sight she must have been, standing in the spotlight with a spray of white blooms tucked behind her ear, glowing brightly against her gleaming black hair.

Despite lacking formal training and never learning how to read music, her undeniable musical talent means she is still held as a singing gold standard, and her beauty signature still provides inspiration for countless would-be icons.

Fast forward
2015 marks the centenary of Billie Holiday’s birth, and while the jazz great is no longer with us, her beauty legacy lives on, both on new pop acts and on the catwalk.

Dark and dreamy singer Lana Del Rey has worked the femme fatale nature of floral hair accessories to the max, wearing a flower crown for her hit single Video Games, sparking the 2010s' biggest festival hair trend.

The old-school glamour of a bloom tucked behind the ear endures into next season and beyond. For her spring-summer 2016 show, Diane von Furstenberg sent her models out with flowers in their hair, a modern update on Holiday’s original elegance.

Gigi Hadid, Karlie Kloss, Jourdan Dunn and Bella Hadid in Diane von Furstenberg's spring-summer 2016 show

.
.
Billie Holiday’s Gardenias

There’s been a flurry of Billie Holiday discussion online today, with DJs Rob Moreland (via Facebook) and Jerry Almonte (via blog) writing about danceable Billie Holiday tunes. Billie’s music is absolutely inspiring and so is her signature look. The images of Billie Holiday with clusters of gardenias in her hair are iconic – so much so, that flowers, or clusters of flowers, have become a quintessential vintage look for singers, dancers, and (as many Etsy listings tout) brides.

comment

Lady Day was truly one of a kind. Not only was she stunningly beautiful and VERY glamourous, but she was (is) unquestionably the greatest female jazz singer of all time. I’ve always loved the trademark gardenias in her hair, and I agree that the modern pinup look with the essential hair flower (gardenias or not) was inspired by her. When Dita Von Teese posed for playboy, on the cover, she’s wearing gardenias in her hair and you see it on practically every girl that’s into old Hollywood glamour/burlesque/ pinup/ rockabilly style. That’s definently Billie Holiday’s influence. Long live Lady Day!

Billie Holiday & Gardenias

How Lady Day made the flower cool again

Having been known for two centuries as a smart buttonhole for rich gentlemen, the Gardenia had gained a rather old-fashioned reputation by the 1930s. Jazz legend Billie Holiday (1915-1959) changed all of that. Before a performance at the start of her career she scorched her hair with an overheated curling tong. In the club’s cloakroom there was a girl selling gardenias to guests, so Billie bought a couple to hide the holes in her hairstyle. It was such a success that it became her trademark.

Copyright: Billie in 1946 in The Downbeat Club © Getty Images
Suddenly the Gardenia was exotic and sexy
Billie became incredibly successful, and thanks to her the Gardenia acquired a completely different image. Both the plant and the flower became ‘cool jazz’ and came to symbolise sensuality, glamour and femininity, but also mystery: Billie liked to wear several flowers or one very large Gardenia above her ear. Too big to ignore, but also almost big enough to hide behind, this gave the Gardenia an extra hint of excitement.

Roaring Gardenia
The Gardenia has recently made its umpteenth comeback, thanks to a fresh appreciation for vintage elements. As both The Great Gatsby and Downton Abbey had a massive influence on the fashion world, the Gardenia’s ‘razzle-dazzle’ factor also became hot again. Thanks to the hipster scene, the Gardenia has remained on trend and the plant is now also being widely embraced by lovers of pure nature for its delectable fragrance. Bring it into your home to experience this for yourself: this flower will suit you too!

 

[IllmaticDelta]

..more Jazz fashion influence...the Zoot Suit and it's widespread influence

ZOOT SUIT (n.): the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit.
—Cab Calloway, The Hepster's Dictionary, 1944

Before the fashion statements of hippies, punks, or hip-hop, there was the zoot suit, a striking urban look of the World War II era that captivated the imagination. Created by poor African American men and obscure tailors, the "drape shape" was embraced by Mexican American pachucos, working-class youth, entertainers, and swing dancers, yet condemned by the U.S. government as wasteful and unpatriotic in a time of war. The fashion became notorious when it appeared to trigger violence and disorder in Los Angeles in 1943—events forever known as the "zoot suit riot." In its wake, social scientists, psychiatrists, journalists, and politicians all tried to explain the riddle of the zoot suit, transforming it into a multifaceted symbol: to some, a sign of social deviance and psychological disturbance, to others, a gesture of resistance against racial prejudice and discrimination. As controversy swirled at home, young men in other places—French zazous, South African tsotsi, Trinidadian saga boys, and Russian stiliagi—made the American zoot suit their own.

In Zoot Suit, historian Kathy Peiss explores this extreme fashion and its mysterious career during World War II and after, as it spread from Harlem across the United States and around the world. She traces the unfolding history of this style and its importance to the youth who adopted it as their uniform, and at the same time considers the way public figures, experts, political activists, and historians have interpreted it. This outré style was a turning point in the way we understand the meaning of clothing as an expression of social conditions and power relations. Zoot Suit offers a new perspective on youth culture and the politics of style, tracing the seam between fashion and social action.

A zoot suit (occasionally spelled zuit suit[1]) is a men's suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. This style of clothing became popular among the Mexican American, African American, Italian American, Filipino American, and, to a lesser extent, Irish American communities during the 1940s.[2][3] In Britain the "Edwardian-look" suits with velvet lapels worn by Teddy Boys are said to be a derivative of the zoot suit.[4]

Zoot Suits were first associated with African Americans in urban communities such as Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit but were made popular by jazz musicians in the 1940s. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word zoot probably comes from a reduplication of suit.

A Brief History of the Zoot Suit
Unraveling the jazzy life of a snazzy style

It was June 1943 when the riots broke out. For over a week, white U.S. soldiers and sailors traversed Los Angeles beating up allegedly “unpatriotic” Mexican-American men, identifiable by their conspicuously voluminous attire. It was, as the historian Kathy Peiss writes in Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style, “perhaps the first time in American history that fashion was believed to be the cause of widespread civil unrest.” Starting this month, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will feature an authentic example of one of these catalyzing ensembles as part of a new exhibition, “Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715–2015.”


With its super-sized shoulder pads, sprawling lapels and peg leg pants, the zoot suit grew out of the “drape” suits popular in Harlem dance halls in the mid-1930s. The flowing trousers were tapered at the ankles to prevent jitterbugging couples from getting tripped up while they twirled. By the ’40s, the suits were worn by minority men in working-class neighborhoods throughout the country. Though the zoot suit would be donned by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, it was “not a costume or uniform from the world of entertainment,” the Chicago big-band trumpeter and clothier Harold Fox once said. “It came right off the street and out of the ghetto.’’

Fox was one among many, from Chicago to Harlem to Memphis, who took credit for inventing the zoot suit—the term came out of African-American slang—but it was actually unbranded and illicit: There was no one designer associated with the look, no department store where you could buy one. These were ad hoc outfits, regular suits bought two sizes too large and then creatively tailored to dandyish effect.



To some men, the suit’s ostentatiousness was a way of refusing to be ignored. The garment had “profound political meaning,” wrote Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man. “For those without other forms of cultural capital,” says Peiss, “fashion can be a way of claiming space for yourself.”

Wartime rations on fabric made wearing such oversized clothing an inherently disobedient act. Langston Hughes wrote in 1943 that for people with a history of cultural and economic poverty, “too much becomes JUST ENOUGH for them.” To underscore the style’s almost treasonous indulgence, press accounts exaggerated the price of zoot suits by upwards of 50 percent. But even the real cost of one was near-prohibitive for the young men who coveted them—Malcolm X, in his autobiography, recounts buying one on credit.

Though policemen slashed some zoot suits to ruins, the more likely reason for their disappearance once the craze faded in the 1950s was less dramatic—most were simply refashioned into other garments. Original specimens are mythically hard to come by: It took curators from LACMA over a decade to find one, and when they did, in 2011, it cost them nearly $80,000, an auction record for an item of 20th-century menswear.

But the suit had a luxuriant afterlife, influencing styles from Canada and France to the Soviet Union and South Africa. It was the subject of the Who’s first single. In 1978, the actor and playwright Luis Valdez wrote Zoot Suit, the first Chicano play on Broadway. The outfit’s iconic shape was taken up in the ’80s by Japanese avant-garde designers, who sent models down the runway in tumescent suiting around the time that MC Hammer put on his drop-crotch pants—causing outrage in the form of widespread hand-wringing over the alleged immorality of sagging pants, a style that has never quite gone out of fashion. By the time a record called “Zoot Suit Riot,” by the swing-revival band the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, became a hit in the late-’90s, the suit’s provenance had largely been forgotten. No longer was the zoot suit evocative of the expressive power of fashion for the disenfranchised so much as it was a historical oddity known by a charming name.

A Brief History of the Zoot Suit | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian

The Zoot suit as rebellion

The zoot suit appears to have developed around 1935 in nightclubs in the black area of Harlem in New York, at Sammy’s Follies and the Savoy Ballroom. Zoot suits exaggerated the smart 1930s look, and were worn by young blacks as an expression of personality in a world where social recognition, and a limited one at that, could only be gained through being a musician, boxer, and in a few instances, as a writer.

The future Malcolm X was fifteen in 1940 when he bought his first zoot suit. In the Autobiography of Malcolm X he describes this outfit: “‘I was measured, and the young salesman picked off a rack a zoot suit that was just wild: sky-blue pants thirty inches in the knee and angle narrowed down to twelve inches at the bottom, and a long coat that pinched my waist and flared out below my knees. As a gift, the salesman said, the store would give me a narrow leather belt with my initial ‘L’ on it. Then he said I ought to also buy a hat, and I did – blue, with a feather in the four-inch brim. Then the store gave me another present: a long, thick-lined, gold plated chain that swung down lower than my coat hem. I was sold forever on credit. … I took three of those twenty-five cent sepia-toned, while-you wait pictures of myself, posed the way ‘hipsters’ wearing their zoots would ‘cool it’ – hat angled, knees drawn close together, feet wide apart, both index fingers jabbed toward the floor. The long coat and swinging chain and the Punjab pants were much more dramatic if you stood that way.’

The determination to have a smart appearance despite poverty, as a sign of pride and self-respect, has a long tradition in the working class. Musicians, whether in blues or jazz, made a big effort to be smartly turned out. Musicians, among them l Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, always dressed in immaculate suits and were called “The Gentlemen of Harlem”.

The zoot suit took this notion of gentility and immaculate clothing three steps further, upping the ante with jackets with huge shoulders and trousers pegged down to the ankles.

As the black author Ralph Ellison in his magnificent novel The Invisible Man wrote: “What about these three boys, coming now along the platform, tall and slender, walking with swinging shoulders in their well-pressed, too-hot-for-summer suits, their collars high and tight about their necks, their identical hats of black cheap felt set upon the crowns of their heads with a severe formality above their conked hair? It was as though I'd never seen their like before: walking slowly, their shoulders swaying, their legs swinging from their hips in trousers that ballooned upward from cuffs fitting snug about their ankles; their coats long and hip-tight with shoulders far too broad to be those of natural western men.”

So the zoot suit was more than an exaggerated gentility, more than a fashion statement. As Stuart Cosgrove notes in The Zoot Suit and Style Warfare: “These youths were not simply grotesque dandies parading the city’s secret underworld, they were ‘the stewards of something uncomfortable’ a spectacular reminder that the social order had failed to contain their energy and difference….The zoot suit was a refusal; a subcultural gesture that refused to concede to the manners of subservience”. It was a symbol of pride of ethnicity.

The zoot suit fashion began spreading from the black urban areas to the Mexican-American youths –the pachucos-of Los Angeles and other towns on the West Coast, who further popularised the look. The Mexican poet and writer Octavio Paz wrote in his The Labyrinth of Solitude that : “The pachucos are youths, for the most part of Mexican origin, who form gangs in southern U.S. cities, they can be identified by their language and behaviour as well as by the clothing they affect. They are instinctive rebels, and North American racism has vented its wrath on them more than once.” The pachucos were second-generation working class immigrants. They were alienated by the racism around them, whether at school, in work or on the welfare line. Rather than hiding their disgust with society, they adopted a swaggering and proud posture. Like black zoot suiters they paraded their hostility and difference. It should be remembered that both pachucos and pachucas held down several jobs at a time, and had to save for many weeks to acquire their expensive and immaculate apparel.

In addition, the style spread to Filipino-American youth. In the 1940s, they were banned from white dance halls in California and began to frequent dance halls with a black and Hispanic clientele, some of them picking up the zoot suit style, as did some Japanese-American youths.

The wearing of the zoot suit became more and more difficult with the outbreak of war and the introduction of wool rationing by the War Production Board in March 1942, with a 26% cut in the use of fabrics. This turned the sporting of zoot suits into illicit acts. However they continued to be made by underground tailors. Zoot suiters became seen more and more as anti-patriotic.

The war mobilised over four million civilians into the US armed forces. At the same time five million women entered the wartime labour force. This caused big changes in family life, with the erosion of parental control. There was a marked increase in juvenile delinquency. Because of parents being on active military service or in war work and with an increase in night work because of the demands of the war, many young people were able to stay out late on street corners, or in bars and cafes.

The Zoot suit as rebellion

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Zazou (France)

The zazous were a subculture in France during World War II. They were young people expressing their individuality by wearing big or garish clothing (similar to the zoot suit fashion in America a few years before) and dancing wildly to swing jazz and bebop. Men wore large striped lumber jackets, while women wore short skirts, striped stockings and heavy shoes, and often carried umbrellas.

One fascist magazine commented on the male Zazou, "Here is the specimen of Ultra Swing 1941: hair hanging down to the neck, teased up into an untidy quiff, little moustache à la Clark Gable... shoes with too-thick soles, syncopated walk."

The Zazous were directly inspired by jazz and swing music. A healthy black jazz scene had sprung up in Montmartre in the inter-war years. Black Americans felt freer in Paris than they did back home, and the home-grown jazz scene was greatly reinforced by this immigration. Manouche Gypsy musicians like Django Reinhardt started playing swinging jazz music in the Paris clubs.

The Zazous probably got their name from a line in a song – Zah Zuh Zah by the black jazz musician Cab Calloway,[4] famous for his Minnie the Moocher. Johnny Hess, a French crooner popular with the Zazous, released Je suis swing in early 1942, in which he sang the lines "Za zou, za zou, za zou, za zou ze", selling more units than any previously released record in France.[5] An associate of the Zazous, the anarchist singer/songwriter, jazz trumpeter, poet and novelist Boris Vian was also extremely fond of z words in his work. The long drape jacket was also copied from zoot suits worn by the likes of Calloway.[4]

"The Zazous were very obviously detested by the Nazis, who on the other side of the Rhine, had [for] a long time decimated the German cultural avant garde, forbidden jazz and all visible signs of...degenerations of Germanic culture…" (Pierre Seel, who, as a young Zazou, was deported to a German concentration camp because of his homosexuality.)

When the yellow star was forced on Jews, non-Jews who objected began to wear yellow stars with ‘Zazu’, ‘Goy’ (Gentile) or ‘Swing’.

Teddy Boy (Britain)

Teddy Boy (also known as Ted) is a British subculture typified by young men wearing clothes that were partly inspired by the styles worn by dandies in the Edwardian period, which Savile Row tailors had attempted to re-introduce in Britain after the Second World War.[1]


Teddy Boy clothing included drape jackets reminiscent of 1940s American zoot suits worn by Italian-American, Chicano and African-American communities (such as Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan), usually in dark shades, sometimes with a velvet trim collar and pocket flaps, and high-waist "drainpipe" trousers, often exposing the socks. The outfit also included a high-necked loose-collared white shirt (known as a Mr. B. collar because it was often worn by jazz musician Billy Eckstine); a narrow "Slim Jim" tie or western Bolo tie, and a brocade waistcoat.[9] The clothes were mostly tailor-made at great expense, and paid for through weekly installments.[10]

Favoured footwear included highly polished Oxfords, chunky brogues, and crepe-soled shoes, often suede (known as brothel creepers). Preferred hairstyles included long, strongly-moulded greased-up hair with a quiff at the front and the side combed back to form a duck's arse at the rear. Another style was the "Boston", in which the hair was greased straight back and cut square across at the nape.

 

[bouncy]

The term Afro-Jamaican doesn't even exist in Jamaica. Every one knows Jamaica is black country. doesn't mean non blacks are not Jamaican. This is a hard concept for Americans to accept tho.
the same way AAs are American even tho America is a white country

why is this hard for Americans to understand

Maybe something is wrong with me, because I never looked at America as a white country, just a lot of white people live here, and therefore have more power, but I never saw it as their country!

I would think the only way I would consider it their country is if they did everything from developing the culture to the laws, but I always knew that wasn't the case, so it being their country was never a thought for me.

I know I sound old, but I just realized this could be why so many foreigners, including blacks, just think black americans were here just living, and contributing nothing. No wonder they worship whites so much, and don't even realize it. I don't know why I never really thought about it, because I thought it was a given how much blacks contributed to this country, without going deep on it.

Even white people give credit sometimes when they tell the American story. So, I'm wondering is it willfully being ignorant, or they really don't know? BUT @Dip is not a foreigner, and he still thinks this, so IDK?

 

[Akata Man Bromo]

Gang with another body