Refuting the myth that Black American music/culture is "Europeanized".

[Oceanicpuppy]

Agreed they never address it. Are they looking at Nigeria as a monolithic entity and not specific region? I mean Nigeria is one of the most diverse countries in Africa.

But in your opinion, do you think AA's have significant Sahelian ancestry? Or less? Sahelian as in I don't just mean Senegambia but also Northern Nigeria, Northern Ghana, Guinea, Niger and Burkina Faso.




Doubt it. Tuaregs are the oldest Berber group. But more importantly they carry signature Berber marker E-M81 in high frequency. They may have obtained some admixture from Fulani's, but that's about it. Meanwhile Fulani's carry E1b1a in high frequencies. Tuaregs near Niger-Congo speakers like the Tuaregs from Niger seem to have the most "Niger-Congo" admixture, while Tuaregs in Algeria, Libya and even Northern Mali mostly have Berber admixture.

They need to test a larger pool of AA's and west Africans. I know there are a lot of immigrants group in Northern Nigeria, Northern Ghana, Guinea, Niger and Burkina Faso so there is a lot of mixing.

Significant Sahelian ancestry in AA's? Yeah, why not.

The 23andme divides the Mali%, Cameroon%, Nigeria%, Ghana%, Northern African% Guinea%, Guinea-Bissau, Niger%, Senegal%, and Sierra Leone% all could possibly be Sahelian derived. Say you've had an ancestor with high Senegal% and Mali% from the Sahel and mating with another Sahelian ancestor with % Nigerian component for a different tribe along the Sahel.

I mean Horners do not even receive the expected high % of East African scores. You would think they would range in 75% < but they received around 35% to 65%. Makes you wonder what is East African?

 

[Oceanicpuppy]

Just curious would you say these Tuaregs have more niger-congo mixture.


I know they found a really old pyramid in Niger that predated some Egyptian pyramids.

 

[3rdWorld]

Agreed they never address it. Are they looking at Nigeria as a monolithic entity and not specific region? I mean Nigeria is one of the most diverse countries in Africa.

But in your opinion, do you think AA's have significant Sahelian ancestry? Or less? Sahelian as in I don't just mean Senegambia but also Northern Nigeria, Northern Ghana, Guinea, Niger and Burkina Faso.




Doubt it. Tuaregs are the oldest Berber group. But more importantly they carry signature Berber marker E-M81 in high frequency. They may have obtained some admixture from Fulani's, but that's about it. Meanwhile Fulani's carry E1b1a in high frequencies. Tuaregs near Niger-Congo speakers like the Tuaregs from Niger seem to have the most "Niger-Congo" admixture, while Tuaregs in Algeria, Libya and even Northern Mali mostly have Berber admixture.

I read recently that the Nigerian part of West Africa in 1914 had 500 languages being spoken when the British established themselves there..

 

[Oceanicpuppy]

Agreed they never address it. Are they looking at



Doubt it. Tuaregs are the oldest Berber group. But more importantly they carry signature Berber marker E-M81 in high frequency. They may have obtained some admixture from Fulani's, but that's about it. Meanwhile Fulani's carry E1b1a in high frequencies. Tuaregs near Niger-Congo speakers like the Tuaregs from Niger seem to have the most "Niger-Congo" admixture, while Tuaregs in Algeria, Libya and even Northern Mali mostly have Berber admixture.

Hear are a few reason I question that berber -tuareg origin.

Tehenu Libyan picture vs Woodabe vs Tuareg

Tuareg don't have Tribal marks ( The women do paint there faces but a lot of it is not permanent )

Feathered head wear
geerewol ceremonial

vs This Tuareg

I think because at one point some Fulani groups were under Tuaregs so we assume they were first.
Also Fulani legends say the first Fulbe ancestors didn't speak Fulfulde.

Pyramids found in Zinder, Niger

Ancient Egyptian sources describe Libyan men with long hair, braided and beaded, neatly parted from different sides and decorated with feathers attached to leather bands around the crown of the head while wearing thin robes of antelope hide, dyed and printed, crossing the shoulder and coming down until mid calf length to make a robe. Older men kept long braided beards. Women wore the same robes as men, plaited, decorated hair and both genders wore heavy jewelry

Algerian Hair vs Fulani

More recently scholars like J.L. Quellec in "Les Gravures Rupestre in Fezzan" have spoken of the numerous connections between C-group Nubians and ancient occupants of the Fezzan (Quellec, 1985, p. 373). These connections likely corroborate why ancient Libyans in Egyptian tomb paintings were found by Bates to wear tattoo designs similar to those present on C-group pottery.
Interestingly, modern Fulani also sport at times a hairstyle in which the hair is left long in the back and head shaved in the front, similar to the description of the hairstyle worn by the ancient Machlyes of ancient Libya who according to Herodotus spread to the river Triton in the Syrtic region.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

They need to test a larger pool of AA's and west Africans. I know there are a lot of immigrants group in Northern Nigeria, Northern Ghana, Guinea, Niger and Burkina Faso so there is a lot of mixing.

Significant Sahelian ancestry in AA's? Yeah, why not.

The 23andme divides the Mali%, Cameroon%, Nigeria%, Ghana%, Northern African% Guinea%, Guinea-Bissau, Niger%, Senegal%, and Sierra Leone% all could possibly be Sahelian derived. Say you've had an ancestor with high Senegal% and Mali% from the Sahel and mating with another Sahelian ancestor with % Nigerian component for a different tribe along the Sahel.

I mean Horners do not even receive the expected high % of East African scores. You would think they would range in 75% < but they received around 35% to 65%. Makes you wonder what is East African?

Good point.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Hear are a few reason I question that berber -tuareg origin.

Tehenu Libyan picture vs Woodabe vs Tuareg

Tuareg don't have Tribal marks ( The women do paint there faces but a lot of it is not permanent )

Feathered head wear
geerewol ceremonial

vs This Tuareg

I think because at one point some Fulani groups were under Tuaregs so we assume they were first.
Also Fulani legends say the first Fulbe ancestors didn't speak Fulfulde.

Pyramids found in Zinder, Niger

Algerian Hair vs Fulani

I never heard of the Tuaregs being said to be descendants of the Tehenu Libyans, but the ancient Garamantes. But even so Tuareg ancestry are not monolithic. Tuaregs in Libya have different origins than Tuaregs from Algeria.

Also those pyramids look natural and not man-made.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Asante-style drum from Virginian slaves

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akan_Drum

This drum was made in the style of the Asante people of Ghana, West Africa, but was collected in Virginia, then an English colony in North America, around AD 1730-45. It is one of the earliest known surviving African-American objects and was probably brought to the New World on the middle passage of a slave-trading voyage. The first passage was from Britain to Africa carrying goods, the second from Africa to the American colonies carrying slaves, and the third from America to Britain carrying trade goods.

The drum is made of native African wood, vegetable fibre and deerskin. It is not known who took the drum to America. It may have been owned by an officer or the captain of a British ship, rather than an African. It was collected by a Reverend Mr Clerk on behalf of Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection was the foundation of the British Museum.

Made in West Africa, collected in Virginia, AD 1730-45.

British Museum video: Akan drum

http://www.britishmuseum.org/Files/TO_Disco_channel.mp4

http://www.britishmuseum.org/channel/object_stories/talking_objects/video_akan_drum.aspx

 

[Oceanicpuppy]

I never heard of the Tuaregs being said to be descendants of the Tehenu Libyans, but the ancient Garamantes. But even so Tuareg ancestry are not monolithic. Tuaregs in Libya have different origins than Tuaregs from Algeria.

Also those pyramids look natural and not man-made.

True, I also think Tuareg ancestry is the root ancestry for the berbers in the west (Kabyle,Riffian,etc) but not necessarily all nomadic/sahelian/groups. I have also read that Ancient Garamantes may have spoke a form of Mande.

A major group from Libya that settled Crete were the Garamante. Robert Graves in (Vol.1, pp.33-35) maintains that the Garamante who originally lived in the Fezzan fused with the inhabitants of the Upper Niger region of West Africa.

This theory is interesting because the chariot routes from the Fezzan terminated at the Niger river. In addition, the Cretan term for king "Minos", agrees with the MandeManding word for ruler "Mansa". Both these terms share consonantal agreement : M N S.

The name Garamante, illustrates affinity to Mande morphology and grammar. The Mande language is a member of the Niger-Congo group of languages. The name for the Manding tribe called "Mande", means Ma 'mother, and nde 'children', can be interpreted as "Children of Ma", or "Mothers children " (descent among this group is matrilineal) . The word Garamante,can be broken down into Malinke-Bambara into the following monosyllabic words Ga 'hearth', arid, hot'; Mante/Mande , the name of the Mande speaking tribes. This means that the term: Garamante, can be interpreted as "Mande of the Arid lands" or "Arid lands of the children of Ma". This last term is quite interesting because by the time the Greeks and Romans learned about the Garamante, the Fezzan was becoming increasingly arid.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Blues Fife

An old unique blues style in the Northern Mississippi hill country called Northern Mississippi Fife and Drum blues, is an offshoot of Fulani Flute and drum music. In fact, the physical construction of the&#65279; blues fife played in Northern MS is based on an old African model brought over by the transatlantic slave trade. The construction process mimics that of the of Fula flute. A musician typically cuts a piece of cane about a foot inlength, then a heated iron rod is used to bore out the cane, and finally the same rod isused to make the manipulation and embouchure holes of the fife. No formal measure of spacing either between the embouchure hole and the manipulation holes or between each of the manipulation holes is used. Instead, the musicians use their hands as guides forconstruction, resulting in instruments that have slightly individualized scales, none of which are based on a classical Western model.

http://www.academia.edu/922424/_Stu...ship_on_North_Mississippi_Blues_Fife_and_Drum

to add to that....





AFRICAN FLUTES

Samuel Charters' love for Ed Young's Mississippi's fife and drum music led him to search for the roots of this African-American folk tradition. Based upon the performance of a group of Fula flute players from Guinea and the observation that a significant portion of early African-American culture descended from Senegal and Gambia, Charters decided to visit the villages of Basse and Diabugu Tenda in the Gambia's upper basin. Arriving there in November of 1976, Charters found the indigenous fife and drum music he was looking for. This LP, African Flutes, is a selection of ten field recordings that were collected by Charters during this stay with the Fula of Basse and the Serrehule of Diabugu Tenda. This sampling of Charter's recordings feature a number of incredible-sounding ensembles from both culture areas. Breathy flute melodies and churning calabash rattles expand and compress with one another in the five recordings of the Fula. Three interlocking drum patterns, a similarly breathy flute, hand clapping, anklet rattles, and female vocals characterize the overall sound of the five Serrehule selections. Charters describes both the Fula and Serrehule flutes as being handmade, wooden, about two feet in length, and having four finger holes. He notes that the Fula flutes are bound together with colorful strips of tape. Not exactly the biggest fan of Fula or Serrehule music, Charters described the calabash Fula rattle as being "a crashingly loud instrument" that projects a deafening "din." He also characterized most Fula music as "harsh and repetitive" and stated that the same description stood for the flute music that they played with "fierce energy." Unfortunately, as was -- and often still is -- the case with ethnomusicological and anthropological fieldwork practices, the names of the individual performers are not listed. The person who gets the credit for "discovering" these sounds is Charters himself. Certainly he deserves to be recognized for his dedication to documenting these fascinating sounds. But doesn't it seem natural that someone so preoccupied with archiving such music would care to ask the performers for their names? Despite this ethnographic oversight on Charters' part, and his often pejorative remarks about the quality of Fula and Serrehule music, African Flutes stands as an important collection of field recordings of the peoples from the Upper Gambia region of Western Africa. As is the case with all of their out of print recordings, Folkways will dub a cassette version or burn a CD copy of African Flutes should you decide to order one. See their website for details.
.

http://www.allmusic.com/album/african-flutes-gambia-mw0000868047

vs

 

[Supper]

@IllmaticDelta As it turns out the Mississippi Fife and Drum players attest that the tradition actually started in Georgia first. And it just so happens that George Mitchell in the 1960s - 1970s was studying blues traditions in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, and discovered that they had their own Fife and Drum tradition.
http://southernspaces.org/2004/blues-lower-chattahoochee-valley

A couple of clips of the Georgia Fife and Drum tradition can be found here.
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/georgia-fife-and-drum-band-mn0000995150/songs

^^^^To me it sounds a lot more like the Fulani Flute and Drum music, so considering the MS F&D players attest to a Georgia origin I'm thinking that the Georgia version must have a more direct connection to the West African/Fulani tradition.

 

[Supper]

@

 

[IllmaticDelta]

@IllmaticDelta As it turns out the Mississippi Fife and Drum players attest that the tradition actually started in Georgia first. And it just so happens that George Mitchell in the 1960s - 1970s was studying blues traditions in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, and discovered that they had their own Fife and Drum tradition.
http://southernspaces.org/2004/blues-lower-chattahoochee-valley

A couple of clips of the Georgia Fife and Drum tradition can be found here.
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/georgia-fife-and-drum-band-mn0000995150/songs

^^^^To me it sounds a lot more like the Fulani Flute and Drum music, so considering the MS F&D players attest to a Georgia origin I'm thinking that the Georgia version must have a more direct connection to the West African/Fulani tradition.

I forgot about the Georgia tradition...I have an album with some those Georgia Fife and Drum recordings

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Often, when people speak about African influences in the New World Blacks, they look to

1. Some type of hand drumming culture

2. Some type of Voodoo like religion/practice where people are making sacrifices and putting hexes on people


In regards to #2 as far as Black americans go





Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition

Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System

In this book, Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between "Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13697064-mojo-workin

If you listen to older Blues, they make many references to Hoodoo


John the Conqueror

John the Conqueror, also known as High John the Conqueror, John de Conquer, and many other folk variants, is a folk hero from African-American folklore. He is associated with a certain root, the John the Conqueror root, or John the Conqueroo, to which magical powers are ascribed in American folklore, especially among the hoodoo tradition of folk magic.



Black cat bone

A black cat bone is a type of lucky charm used in the African American magical tradition of hoodoo. It is thought to ensure a variety of positive effects, such as invisibility, good luck, protection from malevolent magic, rebirth after death, and romantic success.[1]

...Got a black cat bone
got a mojo too,
I got John the Conqueror root,
I'm gonna mess with you...

—"Hoochie Coochie Man," Muddy Waters
The bone, anointed with Van Van oil, may be carried as a component of a mojo bag; alternatively, without the coating of oil, it is held in the charm-user's mouth.[2]


Mojo (African-American culture)

Mojo /ˈmoʊdʒoʊ/, in the African-American folk belief called hoodoo, is an amulet consisting of a flannel bag containing one or more magical items. It is a "prayer in a bag", or a spell that can be carried with or on the host's body.

Alternative American names for the mojo bag include hand, mojo hand, conjure hand, lucky hand, conjure bag, trick bag, root bag, toby, jomo, and gris-gris bag.[1]


Goofer dust

Goofer dust is a traditional hexing material and practice of the African American tradition of hoodoo from the South Eastern Region of the United States of America.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

HOODOO
IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
An Introduction to African-American Rootwork

African American Spirituality has taken diverse forms over the years. Much has been written about Black Churches and the African religious traditions of the diaspora. Less, however, is available on the subject of Black magical spirituality, as exemplified in Hoodoo, Conjure, Rootwork, and Candle Burning.

Southern Spirits brings the ghost-voices of our magical past into the modern age. These are our spiritual ancestors speaking -- both as others heard them and as they told the world about themselves. Listen!

The material at this site was gathered from a variety of sources, including old books, magazine articles, newspapers, and even fragments extracted from novels and short stories. It is heavily annotated with interpretive and comparative notes, especially distinguishing between narratives told *by* practitioners and narratives *about* them, particularly when the latter are recounted by derogatory or "amused" white observers.

http://www.southern-spirits.com/index.html

http://www.luckymojo.com/hoodoo.html

 

[Supper]

How a Mende song survived the journey from West Africa, in the 19th century to the US, today.

Dr. Lorenzo Turner recorded this song in Harris Neck, Georgia in the early 1930s from a Gullah woman named Amelia Dawley. The original version contained ten lines, as some were repeated once or twice. Over the years, the Gullah people who preserved this song changed the pronunciation slightly and deleted a number of one-syllable words, but the text is still understandable to a modern Mende speaker. In fact, the song contains a number of dialectal features characteristic of the Wanjama Mende who dwell in Pujehun District in far southern Sierra Leone, where the Mende and Vai regions border. This is a typical Mende funeral song (finya wulo) performed by women as they pound rice into flour for a sacrifice to the dead. Mende women traditionally remain in town preparing for the sacrifice while the men are in the cemetery preparing the grave. This song was probably handed down among the Gullah from mother to daughter, mother to daughter, through the generations.

The Mende spelling is somewhat altered, as the Mende alphabet contains some special linguistic symbols which cannot be used here. Translations by Momoh Koroma and the author.

Gullah Version

A wohkoh, mu mohne; kambei ya le; li leei tohmbe.
A wohkoh, mu mohne; kambei ya le; li leei ka.
Ha sa wuli nggo, sihan; kpangga li lee.
Ha sa wuli nggo; ndeli, ndi, ka.
Ha sa wuli nggo, sihan; huhan ndayia.

Modern Mende

A wa kaka, mu mohne; kambei ya le'i; lii i lei tambee.
A wa kaka, mu mohne; kambei ya le'i; lii i lei ka.
So ha a guli wohloh, i sihan; yey kpanggaa a lolohhu lee.
So ha a guli wohloh; ndi lei; ndi let, kaka.
So ha a guli wohloh, i sihan; kuhan ma wo ndayia ley.

English

Come quickly, let us work hard; the grave is not yet finished; his heart (the deceased's) is not yet perfectly cool (at peace).

Come quickly, let us work hard; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be cool at once.

Sudden death cuts down the trees, borrows them; the remains disappear slowly.

Sudden death cuts down the trees; let it (death) be satisfied, let it be satisfied, at once.

Sudden death cuts down the trees, borrows them; a voice speaks from afar.

Link



Mende people came in large numbers during the illegal late slave trade to the US.

These patterns held considerable implications for the ethnolinguistic composition of the illegal slave trade. The mix of peoples in the Upper Guinea trade continued to be highly diverse in the illegal era. The largest group was Mende, but Koronko, Mandingo, Susu, Temne, and Fula were well represented. These six groups made up 80 percent of a sample of one thousand captives taken from Galinhas (Guinea-Bissau) and Rio Pongo (Guinea) in the 1820s and 1830s;

Link