This text is part of the Teaching Hard History Text Library and aligns with Key Concept 1, 4, 5, 6 and 9.
From the 16th to the 19th centuries, people from various West African ethnic groups were ripped away from their homes and enslaved by Europeans—first the Portuguese and later the Dutch, English and French. Around 12.5 million enslaved people were captured and shipped to all corners of the Americas, although not all of them survived the trip across the Atlantic Ocean. While it may not be widely known, the majority of enslaved people were not sent directly to the southern colonies of what would later be called the United States: About 92 percent landed in the Caribbean, Central America and South America. Enslaved people were being shipped to Latin America a century before they began arriving in Virginia in 1619, and the vast majority who came directly to the United States arrived after 1700.
History books have often described enslaved people as a people without culture or traditions. However, although they couldn’t usually bring musical instruments with them during the Middle Passage (a term referring to the journey from Africa to the Americas on slavers’ ships), they carried their traditions in their memories. Enslaved people eventually recreated many music and dance traditions while in captivity and on the plantations, by working with the few materials they could get their hands on and making instruments in a slightly different form.
The most common musical instruments used by enslaved people were the banjo and the fiddle. While it eventually became associated with “white” country music, the banjo is actually modeled after a family of West African instruments, such as the kora. Banjo-like instruments were first recreated by enslaved people in the Caribbean in the 17th century, and they began to be used on plantations in the U.S. South in the 18th century. Enslaved people made banjos by hollowing out a gourd or calabash (similar to a large squash), attaching it to a pole for the neck of the instrument and making strings out of horsehair or animal intestines. Other instruments used by enslaved people were made by using different animal bones, like ribs and jawbones, in addition to sticks and other pieces of wood.
Africa is famous for being the birthplace of many types of drums. In fact, drums have historically been used as a form of communication, as in the tradition of “talking drums.” However, after a 1739 slave revolt in South Carolina used drums as a form of communication between enslaved people, the instruments were outlawed in most colonies. While they continued playing drums in secret, most of the time enslaved people invented substitutes to make rhythms for their music. The most common methods were handclapping, foot-stomping and “patting juba,” which meant switching back and forth between foot-tapping, handclapping and slapping the thigh with the hands. Sometimes patting juba was done by beating sticks on the floor to make a rhythm.
Enslaved people were thrown together on the plantations, where Africans from different ethnicities who spoke different languages all lived together. They blended their different types of music and combined them with Euro-American music that they learned by being in contact with white enslavers and overseers. For example, dancing among enslaved people imitated European country dances (now known as square dancing) that are characterized by trading dancing partners. Sometimes Europeans also imitated Negro dances, as they were called. When enslavers held parties and balls, it was often enslaved people who would perform, so they were required to learn European songs and musical forms. Sometimes they would make the European genres more African by using improvisation or by making up melodies or variations on the spot.
Enslaved people performed different types of music at distinct moments in their lives. For example, to keep their spirits up, they sang work songs while they picked cotton, shucked corn, cut wood and did other repetitive work. For this reason, many enslavers and overseers encouraged enslaved people to sing while working, since they thought it made them work harder. This tradition of making music while working was brought directly from Africa, where music was part of daily life. Some work songs were communal (sung in a group) and others were solo songs. “Calls” were used to communicate a message to other workers, while “hollers” were individual songs that expressed more personal feelings and moods, like sadness, loneliness or exhaustion. Hollers evolved after slavery was abolished and were used by street vendors to sell products in Southern cities like Charleston and New Orleans.
While many enslaved people were not allowed to learn to read and write, this doesn’t mean they weren’t intelligent. They showed cleverness by making fun of their enslavers in songs and by using satire. This is a type of humor that doesn’t sound like a criticism on the surface, but that other enslaved people would understand. There were also songs that held hidden messages, like “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” which gave instructions to runaways on how to use the stars to escape slavery and go north.
Beyond music played for fun or dancing, enslaved people also used music for religious worship. In the northern colonies, enslaved people were often converted to Christianity and taught to sing Christian hymns and psalms. In the South, some enslavers did not want to instruct enslaved people in Christianity because they found that it made them “prouder” and less submissive. Also, as transatlantic slavery became more lucrative, men who profited from this system captured and brought more Africans to the United States in the 18th century. Enslavers worked to prevent enslaved people from gathering in large groups. They worried these types of gatherings might lead to revolts. However, enslaved people often held secret religious meetings, called “the invisible church,” late at night after the enslavers were in bed.
The folk spiritual is the earliest form of African-American religious music to develop in the United States, in the late 1700s. Spirituals used Christian verses from the Bible but combined them with lyrics about the specific situation of being enslaved. Singing during worship was usually accompanied by handclapping, body movement and sometimes shouting. Folk spirituals also used an African form of music-making known as “call and response,” where the lead singer would sing a line, the congregation or chorus would respond with the same line, and then the lead singer would improvise.
The ring shout, which involved singing while moving in a circle, was one of the most popular types of worship. Harriet Tubman is said to have sung the spiritual “Wade in the Water” while she was helping enslaved people escape on the Underground Railroad. The lyrics told runaways to walk in the water instead of on land because the dogs used to find them wouldn’t be able to pick up their scent as well.
Both religious and recreational music performed during slavery had major influences on 20th-century African-American music, especially blues and gospel. These genres in turn had a very important influence on popular music (such as rock and roll) that was enjoyed and performed not only by African Americans, but by the white majority. Despite the ways they were often represented, enslaved people were not a cultureless people who lost all their traditions and simply imitated European ones. They actively recreated African traditions from memory and created new genres by mixing them with Euro-American ones.