Predicting Black Musical Innovation and Integration: The 1850 Mance Index for Appalachia

Imagine, if you will, that you are an open-minded musical enthusiast whose only exposure has been to the classical European tradition, with no knowledge of North American music of the last century or before. You are suddenly exposed to the music of, say, Bessie Smith and Josh White (to name just two diverse African-American performers with Appalachian backgrounds). Among the first shocks would be to find that these individuals are clearly working to different standards and modes of performance than their European counterparts. For example, there is an emphasis on rhythmic complexity and syncopation that is largely foreign to European notions, while the European attention to melody development and scalar range is largely absent. Bessie Smith and Josh White are at the same time typical and atypical of African-American performance in the Appalachian context. They are typical in that a number of performers work or worked in similar styles. They are atypical in being recognized as superior in their respective fields. Even white North American music, whether "serious" or otherwise, has departed from standards and modes so central to European thought. Those standards and modes had been so dominant in the European mind that they had once been assumed to apply universally. Why has North American music been so different? Much can be explained by an interaction between the European habits brought by the white settlers and African practices retained, by permission or otherwise, by the slaves brought across the Atlantic. The introduced European music had considerable variety. There were the hymns, dirges, and fugues associated with the church, there was folksong from all parts of the British Isles and any number of parallel continental traditions, and there was the art music, developed over several centuries, by the finest minds working in the "classical" traditions of European music. There was also variety in the music known to the slaves. From West Africa's forests came people who could make drums "talk," to such a perceived degree that tales of the banning of drum playing (to reduce the chance of slave rebellion) are legion. From the Savannah and Sahel adjacent to the Sahara Desert came players of trumpet-like instruments and the stringed forerunners of fiddles, banjoes, and guitars. Was it metaphor alone that led Blind Willie McTell to sing of "Searching the Desert for the Blues"? Why did spirituals, ragtime, jazz, and the blues originate in the United States and not in Iberian America, or even in the Protestant colonies of the Caribbean? The answers are not easy. Perhaps the explanation lies partly in the longer lives of slaves in nontropical climates, permitting some development of standards in performance. Perhaps the vitality and variety of British society, in contrast to the then-decaying Portuguese and Spanish empires, played some part. And although slaves in the United States typically worked to produce commercial crops, the prohibitions against importing further slaves from Africa (especially from 1808 onward) reinforced the expectation that they would replace their numbers by procreation. The crops that became most commercially successful on North American plantations involved intensive activity during part of the year, but the slaves were left with much free time at other periods. That gave them an opportunity to indulge their own tastes in performance rather than being restricted by the tastes of their owners. As the nineteenth century progressed, slavery as an institution was increasingly under threat, both in Britain and in the former northern American colonies. Abolition of slavery began with Vermont in 1777, even before Vermont joined the Union. The institution thrived mainly in those states in which a plantation cropping system had taken root. At base, however, the distinction between the United States and Iberian America depends on the fact that more of the white immigrants to the United States came as families. …