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

[IllmaticDelta]

Charleston red rice or Savannah red rice

Charleston red rice or Savannah red rice is a rice dish commonly found along the Southeastern coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina, known simply as red rice by natives of the region.


This traditional meal was brought over to the U.S. by enslaved Africans originating from the West Coast of Africa. This cultural foodway is almost always synonymous with the Gullah or Geechee people and heritage that are still prevalent throughout the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia.[1] The main component of the dish consists of the cooking of white rice with crushed tomatoes instead of water and small bits of bacon or smoked pork sausage. Celery, bell peppers, and onions are the traditional vegetables used for seasoning.[2]

The dish bears resemblance to African dishes, particularly the Senegambian dish thieboudienne, suggesting a creolization of the dish from West Africa to the New World.[3][4] It also bears a resemblance to jolof rice.[1]

Carolina perlou

Savannah red rice is a cultural and gastronomic legacy that has been around for nearly 300 years. This traditional Southern favorite is an adaptation of a similar dish made all over West Africa called “Jollof rice.” Also known as Carolina perlou, similar variations of rice pilaf with tomatoes appear in the earliest cookbooks from Charleston and Savannah. Red rice is a part of every great Southern cook’s repertoire which can be served as an entrée (with shrimp, chicken or sausage) of as a side dish (without). On occasion we have made this for pot luck cookouts and it is always the first empty dish on the buffet table!

Making a reputable red rice can be challenging and tricky. The best recipes start with a good quality bacon. The use of long grain rice, which at one time could have been exclusively Carolina Gold rice, is essential to the uniqueness of this dish in that hearty long grain rice absorbs the smoky flavor of the bacon and keeps the rice grains from sticking together too much.

carolina Gold rice which originated in Africa and Indonesia, was the basis of the antebellum economy of coastal Carolina and Georgia. Considered the grandfather of long grain rice in the Americas, was first produced in diked wetlands in the Charleston area and eventually planted throughout the South. It was exported worldwide by 1800, and by 1820, over 100,000 acres were producing Carolina Gold Rice.

Virginia peanut soup

Roanoke's favorite combo speaks to its Southern roots


Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia's Roanoke Valley offers endless outdoor recreation -- everything from biking and hiking on hundreds of miles through national forests (the Appalachian Trail traverses the northern end of the valley on its 2,000-plus-mile journey from Maine to Georgia), to white water rafting and canoeing on the James River, to fishing and boating on Smith Mountain Lake. All of which, of course, will make you hungry.

If you're daytripping in the city of Roanoke, there's one dish you absolutely have to try: The peanut soup at the grand Hotel Roanoke.

Considered a Southern delicacy, the gourmet classic dates back to the 1700s in America. But it actually has its roots in Africa. In the 1500s, Portuguese explorers carried the peanut from its native Brazil to Western Africa, where it was quickly embraced by African growers and used for stews, soups and mushes. From there, it was transported once again across the Atlantic, arriving with black-eyed peas and yams in Colonial Virginia via the slave trade.

Virginia peanut soup as we know it, says Michael Twitty, a culinary historian who specializes in African-American foodways, is a direct descendant of maafe, a peanut soup eaten by the Wolof people of Senegal and Gambia. Peanuts -- or groundnuts, as they were then known -- also were grown in Sierra Leone and Angola, where they regularly made their way into stews and spicy sauces. Before long, it found its way into plantation kitchens, "so what we're really looking at is the influence of female and male black cooks."

Some historians claim George Washington so loved peanut soup that he ate it every day, and by 1781, Thomas Jefferson, who cultivated peanuts at Monticello, was writing about them as a common crop, said Mr. Twitty. The first known recipe comes from "House and Home; or, The Carolina Housewife," a collection of Low Country recipes published in 1847 by Sarah Rutledge, a housewife from Charleston, S.C. It included a pint of oysters and peanuts ground with flour.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Maafe

Maafe (var. Mafé, Maffé, Maffe, sauce d'arachide (French), tigadèguèna or tigadenena (Bamana; literally 'peanut butter sauce'), or Groundnut Stew, is a stew or sauce (depending on water content) common to much of West Africa. It originates from the Mandinka and Bambara people of Mali.[1] Variants of the dish appear in the cuisine of nations throughout West Africa and Central Africa

Variations
Recipes for the stew vary wildly, but commonly include chicken, tomato, onion, garlic, cabbage, and leaf or root vegetables. In the coastal regions of Senegal, maafe is frequently made with fish. Other versions include okra, corn, carrots, cinnamon, hot peppers, paprika, black pepper, turmeric, and other spices. Maafe is traditionally served with white rice (in Senegambia), fonio in Mali, couscous (as West Africa meets the Sahara), or fufu and sweet potatoes in the more tropical areas, such as the Ivory Coast. Um'bido is a variation using greens, while Ghanaian Maafe is cooked with boiled eggs.[3] A variation of the stew, "Virginia peanut soup", even traveled with enslaved Africans to North America.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maafe#cite_note-4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maafe#cite_note-4

 

[frush11]

Maafe

Groundnut soup/stew is heavenly

I work in food world, and it bothers me the disrespect Black cuisine gets. These white fukks have no clue how complex most African and Black dishes are

 

[Supper]

The term "Hannah" in this song is a loan word(ráanáa) from the Hausa language of West Africa meaning the sun or day time. It was incorporated in AAVE as "Hannah"

The ancestors of slaves might have known where the name came from. In Hausa, a language widely spoken in areas of West Africa where the slave trade was common, the word for “sun” is “raanaa.”

That African music and oral tradition shaped this music is a truism. It is possible, though, that the language along the Brazos during these years maintained especially close ties to its African roots when compared to what was spoken in areas of the American South that had complied with restrictions on the slave trade.

Link

Connecting the dots.

African-Born Slaves on the Lower Brazos River of Texas in the Nineteenth Century

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Juke (Jukebox/Jukejoint)

Jukebox


In Gullah, there is a word jook or joog, which means disorderly or wicked. This comes from one of these West African languages, either from Bambara dzugu, meaning wicked, or from Wolof dzug, to live wickedly. (As you may guess, these languages are related. Both are members of the Niger-Congo group; Wolof is in effect the national language of Senegal, and is also spoken in Gambia; Bambara is a dialect of Mandekan, the administrative language of the old empire of Mali, now an official language of Mali and an important trade language in the area.)

The Gullah word appeared in the Black English jook house for a disorderly house, often a combination of brothel, gaming parlour and dance hall, perhaps just a shack off the road where you could get a drink of moonshine, sometimes a tavern or roadhouse providing music and the like. This was shortened back to jook and is recorded in this form from the 1930s, though — in the way of such matters — it is almost certainly much older.

The device now called a jukebox wasn't by any means new at the time — its precursors date back to the early 1890s under such names as nickel-in-the-slot phonograph, providing music from Edison wax cylinders to four patrons at a time through stethoscope-like tubes. More sophisticated versions provided music in those jooks that didn’t have their own bands. The first appearance of the term jukebox for them was in — of all places — Time magazine, in 1939: “Glenn Miller attributes his crescendo to the ‘juke-box’, which retails recorded music at 5c a shot in bars, restaurants and small roadside dance joints”. It’s gone up in price a bit since, but next time you see one, think of the long linguistic journey implied by its name.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-juk1.htm

A juke or juke joint is a funky little bar that provides dance music from a piano player, a band, or a jukebox. Jukes have also sometimes doubled as brothels, adding to their bad reputations among church-going folk. A juke might be a stand-alone business or a part-time business run from someone’s house, like the famous Po’ Monkey’s Juke that Willie “Po’ Monkey” Seaberry still operates out of his home in Merigold, MS.

Linguists have traced “juke” to the Gullah (Georgia Sea Islands) word jog, meaning “disorderly.” That word was traced, in turn, to the Bambara tribe’s dzugu, which means “wicked.” There’s also the Wolof word dzug, which means to misbehave or lead a wild life, and the Bantu juka, which means to rise up and do your own thing!

In From Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, Clarence Major wrote that “jook” is an “African word meaning to jab or poke–as in sexual intercourse.” Alligator Records founder Bruce Iglauer told me: “Juke or jook is a term that I’ve heard older musicians use to refer to a particular sexual activity. Hound Dog [Taylor] used it as a verb to describe manual stimulation of the female genitals, including manual insertion of a finger…he obviously considered this a form of foreplay.”

Bluesmen used juke as a catch-all verb for their lifestyle, as in “I’m gonna juke forty years more and then join the church.” The blues was looked upon as wicked by Southern church-going people, especially by the sanctified members of the Church of God in Christ, which was very popular in Delta towns in Mississippi. Members were allowed to dance, sing and raise the roof during the services, but were forbidden from singing or dancing outside the church.

The sanctified preachers loved to give blues musicians tongue lashings from the pulpit. As musician James Thomas explained to William Ferris in Blues from the Delta, “It’s just like if you was singing the blues right now and you die, well, they say you gone to hell because you was singing the blues.” Some bluesmen planned to dodge this fate by eventually returning to the church. Some, like Little Richard and Al Green, became ordained ministers.

Playing the blues was not allowed inside many African American homes in the South. Pianist Henry Gray, who played in the Howlin’ Wolf band in Chicago from 1956 to 1968, was born in Kenner, Louisiana in 1925. Gray told me he began playing piano “when I was about eight years old. I taught myself. The blues was really popular when I was growing up, yes indeed. Stuff like Big Maceo, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, all that old-time blues.” Gray was forbidden to play the blues on the piano at home, though. His parents steered him toward the local church, where he played the organ and piano.

At age sixteen, Gray was asked to play with a band at a local juke joint. He wanted to play the gig but was scared to ask his parents. Gray finally worked up the nerve to ask his father, who agreed to let him play the show, but insisted on accompanying him to the club. “Well,” Gray said, “he saw that it was alright, and that I could make some money at it, so he let me start playing at the jukes, so long as he could keep an eye on me.”

 

[Supper]

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

Mouth bow
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Musical_bow.html

Diddley bow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diddley_bow

The Quills(pan pipes)
http://www.sohl.com/Quills/Quills.htm


Kazoo
http://www.kazoos.com/historye.htm

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

Upon further investigation, I think it's time to update this list and add the southern one string fiddle to that list as it's clearly derived from the West African Goge.

One String Fiddle

As a matter of fact if you use this playlist you can listen to the "Stack O Dollars" performance by Big Joe Williams and the one-string fiddle and compare it to the "Goge" performance by a Hausa performer in Northern Nigeria see that aside from Big Joe's extra background ensemble from the washboard the music is virtually identical.

@IllmaticDelta This seems to be the only surviving recording of a performance with a non-European 4-string derived African-American folk fiddle, or at least the only one I could find. If that's not the African-American version of the west African Goge, then I don't know what is.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Upon further investigation, I think it's time to update this list and add the southern one string fiddle to that list as it's clearly derived from the West African Goge.

One String Fiddle

As a matter of fact if you use this playlist you can listen to the "Stack O Dollars" performance by Big Joe Williams and the one-string fiddle and compare it to the "Goge" performance by a Hausa performer in Northern Nigeria see that aside from Big Joe's extra background ensemble from the washboard the music is virtually identical.

@IllmaticDelta This seems to be the only surviving recording of a performance with a non-European 4-string derived African-American folk fiddle, or at least the only one I could find. If that's not the African-American version of the west African Goge, then I don't know what is.

I posted this before but it's an ex-slaves in 1870's georgia playing one string fiddle!

Mother and son in 1860s-1870's Georgia..the son is playing an African fiddle!

In West Africa

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I don't remember seeing this posted....

Washtub bass

The washtub bass, or "gutbucket", is a stringed instrument used in American folk music that uses a metal washtub as a resonator. Although it is possible for a washtub bass to have four or more strings and tuning pegs, traditional washtub basses have a single string whose pitch is adjusted by pushing or pulling on a staff or stick to change the tension.

The washtub bass was used in jug bands that were popular in some African Americans communities in the early 1900s. In the 1950s, British skiffle bands used a variant called a tea chest bass, and during the 1960s, US folk musicians used the washtub bass in jug band-influenced music.


Variations on the basic design are found around the world, particularly in the choice of resonator. As a result there are many different names for the instrument including the "gas-tank bass", "barrel bass", "box bass" (Trinidad), "bush bass" (Australia), "babatoni" (South Africa), "tingotalango" (Cuba), "tulòn" (Italy), "laundrophone" and others.


The hallmarks of the traditional design are simplicity, very low cost and do-it-yourself construction, leading to its historical association with lower economic classes. These factors also make it quite common for modern-day builders to promote modifications to the basic design, such as adding a finger board, pedal, electronic pickup, drumhead, or making the staff immovable.

Ethnomusicologists trace the origins of the instrument to the 'ground harp' - a version that uses a piece of bark or an animal skin stretched over a pit as a resonator. The ang-bindi made by the Baka people of the Congo is but one example of this instrument found among tribal societies in Africa and Southeast Asia, and it lends its name to the generic term inbindi for all related instruments. Evolution of design, including the use of more portable resonators, has led to many variations, such as the dan bau (Vietnam) and gopichand (India), and more recently, the "electric one-string", which amplifies the sound using a pickup.

The washtub bass is sometimes used in a jug band, often accompanied by a washboard as a percussion instrument. Jug bands, first known as "spasm bands", were popular especially among African-Americans around 1900 in New Orleans and reached a height of popularity between 1925 and 1935 in Memphis and Louisville.

At about the same time, European-Americans of Appalachia were using the instrument in "old-timey" folk music. A musical style known as "gut-bucket blues" came out of the jug band scene, and was cited by Sam Phillips of Sun Records as the type of music he was seeking when he first recorded Elvis Presley.

According to Willie "The Lion" Smith's autobiography, the term "gutbucket" comes from "Negro families" who all owned their own pail, or bucket, and would get it filled with the makings for chitterlings. The term "gutbucket" came from playing a lowdown style of music.[1]

In English skiffle bands, Australian and New Zealand bush bands and South African kwela bands, the same sort of bass has a tea chest as a resonator. Before the Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney's band, The Quarrymen, featured a tea-chest bass, as did many young bands around 1956.

A folk music revival in the U.S. in the early 1960s re-ignited interest in the washtub bass and jug band music. Bands included Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions which later became The Grateful Dead, and, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band featuring Fritz Richmond on bass.

vs

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Just in case people aren't aware of just how deep the African-American influence on popular music throughout the world is.

The 12-bar blues or blues changes is one of the most prominent chord progressions in popular music.[/quote]

Diversity in what can be done with the 12 bar blues form

 

[KwamePiesie]

The Greatest Thread On The Coli

 

[Mr.Big Meat McGee]

Theres a good Cuban influence on black music but that's where it ends

Jamaicans had a big influence on Hip Hop.

 

[K.O.N.Y]

Jamaicans had a big influence on Hip Hop.

no they didn't word to @IllmaticDelta

 

[Mr.Big Meat McGee]

no they didn't word to @IllmaticDelta

"Very significant, but little appreciated outside New York’s Caribbean community at the time, was the introduction of the Jamaican "sound system" style to the city’s party-going mix. Using their own versions of mixing boards, since the 60’s DJs around Jamaica had given "back-a-yard" parties where the bass and drum pounded like jackhammers. The "dub" style of these mobile DJs stripped away melody to give reggae’s deep, dark grooves throbbing prominence." Reggae music must be acknowledged for setting the beginnings for hip-hop, especially through reggae’s use of dubbing.

Dubbing is an instrumental remix of an original tune. It usually was the B-side of Jamaican 45s, which was a remix of the A-side. In Jamaica, record cutters "began to dub out the band track right after the intro of the tune and during the first few bars of vocals, leaving the singers acappella. Then abruptly shut off the vocals, sometimes chopping off words and letting the band roll." Songs could be cut to pieces and be put anywhere on the record; nothing had to sound smoothly. You could get fleeting moments of sound. The next cut would be unpredictable creating suspense in a song, yet it was vital that the song still unfolded naturally. "Dub is a kaleidoscopic musical montage which takes sounds originally intended as interlocking parts of another arrangement and using them as raw material, converts them into new and different sounds; then, in its own rhythm and format, it continually reshuffles these new sounds into unusual juxtapositions."

This sound interested urban artists in the United States, especially in the African American community. Dubbing was being called "scratching" in the states. "Scratching" took popularity in the South Bronx, a poverty-stricken area in New York. One main reason why it developed here was because for "scratching" all that was needed was two turn tables and a mic; this was relatively inexpensive compared to band equipment. It led to techniques of punch phrasing and break spinning. ""Punch phrasing" —playing a quick burst from a record on one turntable while it continues on the other — and "break spinning"–alternately spinning both records backward to repeat the same phrase over and over."

Afika Bambaata, Kool Herc, and Grandmaster Flash, are three legends of hip-hop. They are looked as the founding fathers. Kool Herc, is the only one out of the three that gives credit to his Jamaican roots for his early development of break spinning. "Hip-hop….the whole chemistry of that came from Jamaica…..In Jamaica all you needed was a drum and a bass. So what I did was go right to the ‘yoke’. I cut off all the anticipation and just played the beats. I’d find out where the break in the record was and prolonged it and people would love it. So I was giving them their own taste and beat percussion wise….cause my music is all about heavy bass."

Lee Scratch Perry created the idea of injecting sound effects into his versions and dubs. "His own "upsetter" rhythms have long been a staple of the genre (and echo throughout hip-hop today) and he virtually invented sampling." The original sound effects were babies crying, pistol shots, police whistles and breaking glass. These were sounds of the inner cities of Jamaica and America. Without this, we wouldn’t have cop sirens or gun-shots in the background of today’s rap songs. N.W.A. (******s With Attitude) would not be able to give the overall effect of gang violence, without sound effects in there song "Straight Out of Compton". To people this was shocking but it brought forth the reality of urban communities that many looked away from.

For its musical grooves, early hip hop incorporated elements of the party-based sound-system subculture popular at the time in Jamaica and brought to the Bronx by DJ Kool Herc from Kingston. Kool Herc transported the large mobile sound units used in Jamaica to parties in the Bronx. Herc also brought a form of the verbal art of "toasting" to his parties. Jamaican DJs excited crowds by making up short raps to the beat of music, adding "vibes" to the party. The toasts often referred to people in the crowd or to events at the party itself. Ironically this style of toasting was derived from the "rapping" of black American radio DJs from the 1940s through the 1960s, men who influenced the toasting style of the Jamaican dancehall producer Coxson Dodd. Dodd took rapping to Jamaica and Herc brought toasting back to the United States, where it quickly became known as rap, the verbal side of hip hop music. Herc is also credited with popularizing the break-beat style of DJing. Instead of playing an entire record or song, Herc focused on the break, a section of the record where there was a drum or horn solo, for example. By playing this section repeatedly, thereby creating and stressing a new rhythm that could be sustained as long as he wanted, Herc greatly heightened the crowd's (especially the dancers') excitement. Other pioneering DJs used these methods and the latest stereo and sound system technology of the day to create some of the most influential songs in hip hop history. Afrika "Bam" Bambaataa fused the R&B music of James Brown, the funk of George Clinton, and even the sometimes synthetic and cold European electronic music of groups like Kraftwerk to create songs like "Planet Rock" and "Looking for the Perfect Beat," and helped deepen the musical roots of hip hop as a result.

http://debate.uvm.edu/dreadlibrary/board.html
http://www.oxfordaasc.com/public/features/archive/0806/essay.jsp

 

[bouncy]

@Deadoo whoever wrote that nonsense should be fukked up for spreading lies!

First of all scratching is nothing like dub. The fact that the writer compares dub to scratching, shows he or she has no idea what they are writing about.

Second, it was DISCO that had everyone doing the sound system thing, not reggae or any type of west Indian music. With disco it was all about the DJ and his sound system. A lot of DJs went to the store to get their equipment, so that tells you how big sound systems were in NYC. And this was before herc, bam, and flash. WAAYY before they started djing.

Third, I give Kool Herc credit for playing nothing but breakbeats, which created what we love but, he said he did it because he noticed that the young kids would only dance when the break came on. Now, he is trying to make it seem like its because of being west Indian? I am slowly falling out of love with some of the old school founders because of the bullshyt some of them are doing with not telling the truth and constantly changing their story to be mythical. There is controversy with Africa bambatta for doing the same thing as far as him uniting the gangs, and stopping it in NYC. Also, his story of winning a trip to Africa, might be a lie.

Fourth, Kool Herc didn't talk on the mic and rhyme, his man coke LA rock did, and he was an AA with family from n.c.

The fact is hip hop in the beginning was not influenced that much from west Indian music because most AA wasn't listening to it, even kool herc said himself it wasn't getting play back then so how can west Indian music influence the creators of hip hop when no one was listening to it.

Again it was DISCO that helped birth this rap shyt, not Jamaican music. In actuality it was hip hop that had a major influence on Jamaican music because once rap became popular in NYC, dancehall was created around 1981. Before rap you wasn't hearing nobody rapping on Jamaican records. Toasting is not rapping, it is just mc'ing a party but being witty with it. Chatting is rapping, and that started way after rappers was doing their thing in NYC. Blacks have been doing "toasting" since we talked on microphones. That wasn't exclusive to jamaica, we all did it.

Go to YouTube, and search Michael waynetv. You can hear and see from the people who were there, and hear kool Herc himself say his style came from watching what was going on, not something he brought from Jamaica.

 

[Supper]

Theres a good Cuban influence on black music but that's where it ends

Even the Cuban influences on African-American music are grossly overstated largely by dishonest Cuban nationalist. The so called "Habanera" otherwise known as the "Spanish Tinge" and the "Clave" motifs which aren't even that prominent in Jazz & RnB as compared to Swing & Backbeat rhythms originate in native African-American folk dances down on the plantations of the US south such as the Juba dance & Ring Shouts and from there were transferred into the Charleston dance and Bo-Diddley's hit single which popularized the "clave" rhythm in America which are shown to have no connections to Cuba.