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Brief Chronology of African-American Music and Jazz
Before 1850
Folk music based on African forms.
White dance and band music.
Circa 1850
Plantation songs sung by slaves.
Slave and plantation music was the first of five local American influences on jazz tradition.
Around 1850 plantation songs sung by the slaves had developed their individual character.
They were strongly influenced by African rhythm and led directly to the embryonic country blues.
'Lawdy, Capt'n, I's not a singin' I's a jes hollerin' for help'
The music always had a strong ground beat, full of field hollers, forerunner of 'the break', and insistent
call and response patterns, blue notes, falsetto voices with melisma.
During the Civil War, 'Slave Songs of the United States' was published by William Francis Allen, Charles
Pickford Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison.
After the Civil War prison songs were identifiable as a development of the plantation songs.
People - Huddie Ledbetter (1888 - 1949) work songs, prison songs and black ballads
Minstrelsy
was white music meant to copy plantation songs.
Minstrel shows developed in the 1840’s, peaked after the Civil War and remained popular into the early
1900s. Minstrelsy was a product of its time, the only entertainment form born out of blind bigotry. In these shows, white
men blackened their faces with burnt cork to lampoon Negroes, performing songs and skits that sentimentalized the nightmare
of slave life on Southern plantations. Blacks were shown as naive buffoons who sang and danced the days away, gobbling "chitlins,"
stealing the occasional watermelon, and expressing their inexplicable love for "ol' massuh."
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Fun Fact:
Origin(?) of the word "JAZZ"
Songwriter, musician, Clarence Williams says that he was the
first to use the word "jazz" in a song. Williams said, "On both Brown Skin, Who You For? and Mama's Baby Boy, I used the words,
jazz song, on the sheet music. I don't exactly remember where the words came from, but I remember I heard a woman say it to
me when we were playin' some music. `Oh, jazz me, baby,' she said."
Early jazz men said "to jazz" meant to fornicate, or as they
put it "jazzing meant effing." (fucking) A "jazzbow" or "jazzbo" was a lover of the ladies. According to some sources, the
word Jazz was also underworld jargon found in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Jazz had many names: jabo, jaba, jazpation, jazynco,
jazorient, jazanola. Also jazanata, jazarella, jazanjaz, jazology, jazette, jazitis and jazioso.
According to Arnold Loyacano, the word jazz had different origins.
Loyacano was in Tom Brown's band, which in 1915, was the first white band to ever go to Chicago and play jazz. They were playing
in a hotel which previously had a string quartet for entertainment. Brown's band had been used to playing on the back of a
wagon, which meant that they had to play loud and were really incapable of playing soft. The crowd's reaction was to hold
their ears and yell, "Too loud!" Loyacano says that was when people started calling his music "jazz." "The way Northern people
figured it out, our music was loud, clangy, boisterous, like you'd say, ~Where did you get that jazzy suit?" meaning loud
or fancy. Some people called it "jass." Later when the name struck, it was spelled with a "z," "jazz."
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