Suggestions for American Black culture?

[Supper]

Easter Rock​

 

[xoxodede]

Juneteenth and Juneteenth Celebrations

 

[xoxodede]

Gospel Quartets were the first Black male groups. They kicked off everything.

 

[Tiffrock]

You must be a big Fred Hammond looking azz dude to have Sweet Potato pie as the first thing that come to your mind

I almost spit out my water

 

[Supper]

Br'er Rabbit - Wikipedia

 

[Supper]

It's well known in the boxing world that African-Americans actually do have our own unique boxing style that's based around 'slick' defense foot work and head movement that prioritizes hitting without getting hit.

"Float like a butterfly sting like a bee".
Adeyinka Makinde, Writer: Floyd Mayweather: The Aesthetics of African-American Boxing Style

In the 18th century former AA slave, Bill Richmond, went to England and introduced a style of defensive footwork that he learned from sparring with other enslaved AAs into british boxing that allowed him to defeat much bigger opponents. He later went on to open a popular boxing academy in Britain to teach the style.

These bouts appear closer to English-style pugilism than the descriptions of “cutting” described above. This may have made New York an important point of transition, allowing black fighters with “knocking and kicking” or “cutting” backgrounds to gradually adapt to rules like English prizefighting. Yet the defensive techniques of knocking and kicking, which included dance-like footwork, ducks, dodges, and dropping below a strike, were all applicable to prizefighting under any rules. Indeed, Richmond introduced the science of these techniques into British boxing, which had quite a different approach to defense.

CONTENTdm
Boxing Pioneers - Boxing Forum
Possible Angola-style dancing defense origins according to the first article.

There's also the jailhouse rock/52 block system that became popular in prisons on the eastern seaboard. And the knocking and kicking style of the gullah/geechee people.
Jailhouse rock (fighting style) - Wikipedia

African-American boxers pioneered the modern cross arm lock, shoulder roll, and philly shell techniques.

THE SHELL GAME - BOXRAW
Solving Styles: Archie Moore, part 1
(Hiawatha Gray mentioned in the article is an AA man)



Origins of the Shoulder Roll





Boxing styles explained

African American - Obviously a diverse group with a lot of different fighting styles, but there are archetypes here. In America, Amateur fighting has never been a big or well respected establishment so a lot of the styles developed were specifically for the professional game. Most of the styles as we know them (Boxer, Puncher, Swarmer, etc) were developed in america. The only regional style equivalent I know of is the defensive style associated with a number of black gyms. I believe this style developed out of how frequently black fighters needed to fight in the past to make good money. As a result, they developed a defence first style to prevent damage. This is obviously not necessary for today's game, but there's a ripple effect through a number of "slick" fighters today. These sorts of fighters generally use a lot of crafty boxing tricks, like rough inside boxing, dirty tactics and distance control to frustrate their opponents. There's also a newer version of this style, where the focus isn't on protecting yourself, but making the opponent look bad so you can win rounds. This involves a lot of shot picking, taunting and defensive movement. Old Style - Bernard Hopkins, Andre Ward New Style Floyd Mayweather, Adrien Broner

 

[Supper]

Cont.

Stereotypical boxing styles

African American boxers are typical slick boxers,. Similar to Cuban but right handed and more aggressive typically . Not all out agression but they will utilize combinations more and are known as "flashy". There are exceptions to every rule though.

African-Americans are slick, utilize flashy combos, fast hands and feet. Usually don't go for the knockout unless it presents itself.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I think many people who try to say African Americans don't have a culture, are only saying that because we don't have a culture that is separate from American culture..

Which is weird because aframs are AMERICANS and are MORE AMERICAN than most "whites"/anyone outside of Native Amerindians and OG stock white americans. The culture that developed with Aframs is both ubiquitous to the fabric of America (yes even on white americans) on the whole and distinctly Afram (different from white americans) at the same time.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Pretty every American musical genre, for starters. Most dance forms that are US-born. A number of musical instruments. Southern-cuisine in American is basically African-American food.

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I think you were gone when I dropped this gem but I'll repost


american/southern style bbq is afram in origin

How Southern Barbecue got to Texas
Hint: Slaves Brought it With Them

A Southern Barbecue, a wood engraving from a sketch by Horace Bradley, published in Harper’s Weekly, July 1887

Tim Miller helped explain why Texans might have forgotten slaves’ influence in his book, Barbecue: A History.

Of course, barbecue would have come to much of Texas the same way it came to most of the American South: through the influx of slave owners and their slaves, moving west across the continent. The rewriting of the story of Texas described above not only made Texas history, focusing on cowboys, a proper subject after the Civil War, but in the process also wrote blacks out of the state’s history entirely, leaving a question mark in terms of where barbecue came from.

By the time Robb Walsh wrote his award-winning article for the Houston Press, “Barbecue in Black and White,” the black pitmaster stereotype was gone from Texas. Walsh asked, “How did it happen that we forgot blacks used to cook barbecue in Texas in the first place?” Walsh also recounts an admission from a famous white barbecue joint owner about Memphis’ barbecue roots. Charlie Vergos of the famous Rendezvous restaurant told Lolis Elie in his documentary, Smokestack Lightning: A Day in the Life of Barbecue:

Brother, to be honest with you, [barbecue] don’t belong to the white folks, it belongs to the black folks. It’s their way of life, it was their way of cooking. They created it. They put it together. They made it. And we took it and we made more money out of it than they did. I hate to say it, but that’s a true story.

How Southern Barbecue got to Texas : TMBBQ

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Kansas City-style barbecue refers to the specific regional barbecue style of slowly smoked meat that evolved from the pit of Henry Perry in the early 1900s in Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas City barbecue is slow-smoked over a variety of woods and then covered with a thick tomato- and molasses-based sauce.[1]

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[Akata Man Bromo]

UniverSoul Circus

Hitting up the universSOUL circus has always been something we did all of the 2000's Im going this weekend.

Also jumping the broom is AA culture/tradition Im doing it at my wedding

@xoxodede @IllmaticDelta @Poitier @Diasporan Royalty

Yo yall ever hear of Asue (spelling might be wrong) but my parents and grand parents use to be on that heavy when I was young. Its basically like a loan program between a group of black folks it's dope and I want to start one with my boys

 

[Poitier]

@xoxodede @IllmaticDelta @Poitier @Diasporan Royalty

Yo yall ever hear of Asue (spelling might be wrong) but my parents and grand parents use to be on that heavy when I was young. Its basically like a loan program between a group of black folks it's dope and I want to start one with my boys

Likelemba,Tontine, Susu, Stokvel, Tanda, Shalongo, Ukoob, Ayuuto, Hagbad - Various rotating credit systems that are popular across the Diaspora

I wrote about it briefly in my diasporic thread but I didn't know there was a AA version

 

[IllmaticDelta]

@xoxodede @IllmaticDelta @Poitier @Diasporan Royalty

Yo yall ever hear of Asue (spelling might be wrong) but my parents and grand parents use to be on that heavy when I was young. Its basically like a loan program between a group of black folks it's dope and I want to start one with my boys

the concept has many names, but no, I've never heard any aframs use the term "susu" for it

 

[invalid]

Being consistantly late for events

Basically...

Telling everyone the dinner starts at 4:00 pm so people get there at 6:00.

Nah.... that’s an inherited trait from our African brethren. They’re worse then us.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Jazz comes to mind first.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

So what are some things unique or originating with American Blacks? Even if they've been coopted by cacs, if we fathered it we may have claim to it.

The Blues, hands down the most distinct music of the Afro-New World due to an obvious Senegambian-Sahelian influence that can't be found anywhere else in the new world

A look back at/celebration of the most influential style of music that's fed all American popular music since the late 19th century and even music abroad throughout the world. The Blues and it's impact comes in many forms.

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll is characterized by specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues chord progression is the most common. The blue notes that, for expressive purposes are sung or played flattened or gradually bent (minor 3rd to major 3rd) in relation to the pitch of the major scale, are also an important part of the sound.

The blues genre is based on the blues form but possesses other characteristics such as specific lyrics, bass lines and instruments. Blues can be subdivided into several subgenres ranging from country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the 20th century. Best known are the Delta, Piedmont, Jump and Chicago blues styles. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues-rock evolved.

Form


The blues form is a cyclic musical form in which repeating progression of chords mirrors the call and response scheme commonly found in African and African-American music. During the first decades of the 20th century blues music was not clearly defined in terms of a particular chord progression. With the popularity of early performers, such as Bessie Smith, use of the twelve-bar blues spread across the music industry during the 1920s and 30s. Other chord progressions, such as 8-bar forms, are still considered blues; examples include "How Long Blues", "Trouble in Mind", and Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway". There are also 16-bar blues, as in Ray Charles's instrumental "Sweet 16 Bars" and in Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man". Idiosyncratic numbers of bars are also encountered occasionally, as with the 9-bar progression in "Sitting on Top of the World" by Walter Vinson.


The basic 12-bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of 12 bars in a 4/4 time signature. The blues chords associated to a twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a 12-bar scheme. They are labeled by Roman numbers referring to the degrees of the progression. For instance, for a blues in the key of C, C is the tonic chord (I) and F is the subdominant (IV). The last chord is the dominant (V) turnaround, marking the transition to the beginning of the next progression. The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the 11th bar, and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break; the harmony of this two-bar break, the turnaround, can be extremely complex, sometimes consisting of single notes that defy analysis in terms of chords.

Much of the time, some or all of these chords are played in the harmonic seventh (7th) form. The use of the harmonic seventh interval is characteristic of blues and is popularly called the "blues seven". Blues seven chords add to the harmonic chord a note with a frequency in a 7:4 ratio to the fundamental note. At a 7:4 ratio, it is not close to any interval on the conventional Western diatonic scale. For convenience or by necessity it is often approximated by a minor seventh interval or a dominant seventh chord.


In melody, blues is distinguished by the use of the flattened third, fifth and seventh of the associated major scale. These specialized notes are called the blue or bent notes. These scale tones may replace the natural scale tones, or they may be added to the scale, as in the case of the minor blues scale, in which the flattened third replaces the natural third, the flattened seventh replaces the natural seventh and the flattened fifth is added between the natural fourth and natural fifth. While the 12-bar harmonic progression had been intermittently used for centuries, the revolutionary aspect of blues was the frequent use of the flattened third, flattened seventh, and even flattened fifth in the melody, together with crushing—playing directly adjacent notes at the same time (i.e., diminished second)—and sliding, similar to using grace notes. The blue notes allow for key moments of expression during the cadences, melodies, and embellishments of the blues.



Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and call-and-response, and they form a repetitive effect called a groove. Characteristic of the blues since its Afro-American origins, the shuffles played a central role in swing music. The simplest shuffles, which were the clearest signature of the R&B wave that started in the mid 1940s, were a three-note riff on the bass strings of the guitar. When this riff was played over the bass and the drums, the groove "feel" was created. Shuffle rhythm is often vocalized as "dow, da dow, da dow, da" or "dump, da dump, da dump, da": it consists of uneven, or "swung," eighth notes. On a guitar this may be played as a simple steady bass or it may add to that stepwise quarter note motion from the fifth to the sixth of the chord and back. An example is provided by the following guitar tablature for the first four bars of a blues progression in E

In the 1950s, blues had a huge influence on mainstream American popular music. While popular musicians like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, both recording for Chess, were influenced by the Chicago blues, their enthusiastic playing styles departed from the melancholy aspects of blues. Chicago blues also influenced Louisiana's zydeco music, with Clifton Chenier using blues accents. Zydeco musicians used electric solo guitar and cajun arrangements of blues standards.

Overseas, in England, electric blues took root there during a much acclaimed Muddy Waters tour. Waters, unsuspecting of his audience's tendency towards skiffle, an acoustic, softer brand of blues, turned up his amp and started to play his Chicago brand of electric blues. Although the audience was largely jolted by the performance, the performance influenced local musicians such as Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies to emulate this louder style, inspiring the British invasion of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.

In the late 1950s, a new blues style emerged on Chicago's West Side pioneered by Magic Sam, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush on Cobra Records. The 'West Side Sound' had strong rhythmic support from a rhythm guitar, bass guitar and drums and as pefected by Guy, Freddie King, Magic Slim and Luther Allison was dominated by amplified electric lead guitar.

Other blues artists, such as John Lee Hooker had influences not directly related to the Chicago style. John Lee Hooker's blues is more "personal", based on Hooker's deep rough voice accompanied by a single electric guitar. Though not directly influenced by boogie woogie, his "groovy" style is sometimes called "guitar boogie". His first hit, "Boogie Chillen", reached #1 on the R&B charts in 1949.

By the late 1950s, the swamp blues genre developed near Baton Rouge, with performers such as Lightnin' Slim, Slim Harpo, Sam Myers and Jerry McCain around the producer J. D. "Jay" Miller and the Excello label. Strongly influenced by Jimmy Reed, Swamp blues has a slower pace and a simpler use of the harmonica than the Chicago blues style performers such as Little Walter or Muddy Waters. Songs from this genre include "Scratch my Back", "She's Tough" and "I'm a King Bee". Alan Lomax's recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell would eventually bring him wider attention on both the blues and folk circuit, with McDowell's droning style influencing North Mississippi hill country blues musicians





Musical impact

Blues musical styles, forms (12-bar blues), melodies, and the blues scale have influenced many other genres of music, such as rock and roll, jazz, and popular music. Prominent jazz, folk or rock performers, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Bob Dylan have performed significant blues recordings. The blues scale is often used in popular songs like Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night", blues ballads like "Since I Fell for You" and "Please Send Me Someone to Love", and even in orchestral works such as George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Concerto in F". Gershwin's second "Prelude" for solo piano is an interesting example of a classical blues, maintaining the form with academic strictness. The blues scale is ubiquitous in modern popular music and informs many modal frames, especially the ladder of thirds used in rock music (for example, in "A Hard Day's Night"). Blues forms are used in the theme to the televised Batman, teen idol Fabian's hit, "Turn Me Loose", country music star Jimmie Rodgers' music, and guitarist/vocalist Tracy Chapman's hit "Give Me One Reason".

The blues' 12-bar structure and the blues scale was a major influence on rock and roll music. Rock and roll has been called "blues with a backbeat"; Carl Perkins called rockabilly "blues with a country beat". Rockabillies were also said to be 12-bar blues played with a bluegrass beat. "Hound Dog", with its unmodified 12-bar structure (in both harmony and lyrics) and a melody centered on flatted third of the tonic (and flatted seventh of the subdominant), is a blues song transformed into a rock and roll song. Jerry Lee Lewis's style of rock and roll was heavily influenced by the blues and its derivative boogie woogie. His style of music was not exactly rockabilly but it has been often called real rock and roll (this is a label he shares with several African American rock and roll performers).

Early country music was infused with the blues. Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe and Hank Williams have all described themselves as blues singers and their music has a blues feel that is different to the country pop of Eddy Arnold. A lot of the 1970s-era "outlaw" country music by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings also borrowed from the blues. When Jerry Lee Lewis returned to country after the decline of 1950s style rock and roll, he sang his country with a blues feel and often included blues standards on his albums. Many early rock and roll songs are based on blues: "That's All Right Mama", "Johnny B. Goode", "Blue Suede Shoes", "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On", "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", and "Long Tall Sally". The early African American rock musicians retained the sexual themes and innuendos of blues music: "Got a gal named Sue, knows just what to do" ("Tutti Frutti", Little Richard) or "See the girl with the red dress on, She can do the Birdland all night long" ("What'd I Say", Ray Charles). The 12-bar blues structure can be found even in novelty pop songs, such as Bob Dylan's "Obviously Five Believers" and Esther and Abi Ofarim's "Cinderella Rockefella".

The blues grew out of the plantations and prisons, the swampy marshes and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. With original research and keen insights, Ted Gioia, the author of a landmark study of West Coast jazz and the critically acclaimed The History of Jazz brings to life the stirring music of the Delta, evoking the legendary figures who shaped its sound and ethos: Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and others. Tracing the history of the Delta blues from the field hollers and plantation music of the nineteenth century to the exploits of modern-day musicians in the Delta tradition, Delta Blues tells the full story of this timeless and unforgettable music. No cultural force boasts such humble origins or such world-conquering reverberations. In this evocative rags-to-riches tale, Gioia shows how the sounds of the Delta altered the course of popular music in America and in the world beyond.

The Blues form is so elastic, you can almost compose any kind of music to it