The record changer (Jan-Dec 1944)

The Record Changer, July 1944 Jazz and the (Continued Copland and Thompson. And inevitably so: there is little in these American composers which is not borrowed from Europe and would therefore seem trite to the Europeans themselves. But there is a great deal in American popular music which does not stem from Europe and thus holds the attraction of novelty, if not originality, for the Europeans who have not heard it before. This element of originality in American popular music — and it is the only element of originality on the whole musical horizon of America — is the Negro tradition which entered popular music not only via jazz but, long before, via Minstrelsy and Holy Roller music. The story of American folk music begins not with the Mayflower but with a slave ship of 1619, when, as John Rolfe tells in his Generall Historie of John Smith, "about the last of August came in a Dutch man-of-warre that sold us twenty negars." By 1670, there were 2000 slaves working in Virginia alone. By 1680, fifty percent of the population were of African stock.1 Fifty years later, tobacco as a staple crop had given way to rice and indigo and the indentured white servants of the seventeenth century had given way to African slaves; the plantation system had become an established production economy.2 At the turn of the nineteenth century, cotton and sugar plantations were introduced and the last vestiges of indentured labor disappeared.3 From the first 300 slaves of Virginia in 1649, slavery spread to the Carolinas and to Maryland where the slaves became one-third of the population in 1 7 1 5. In 1720, Louisiana made slavery legal, and in 1750 Georgia followed suit.4 By 1754, 36 per cent of the population of the five colonies were Negro slaves (222,000 out of 609, 000). 5 E. D. Morel says that between 1680 and 1786 2,130,000 slaves were sent to the British colonies in America, and 1,850,000 between 1776 and 1800. Brian Edwards, in his History of the West Indies, says that between 1790 and 1800 74,000 annually were shipped from Africa. In 1808, the slave trade was made illegal in America, yet over 2,500,000 slaves were landed within the next fifty years "after slavery." Geoffrey Gorer, in his essay on "The City of Harlem," says that these Negro slaves could with justice be called the original Americans, for at any rate one line of their ancestry had been in the Anthropologist from page 5 ) United States longer than any comparable group of . white Americans. Most of the Negroes came to America before the end of the eighteenth century; most of the whites in the middle of the nineteenth, and even later. Gorer suggests that a Negro Social Register, based on ancestry, might well be set up. The only reason why no slave ship has yet been named in rivalry to the Mayflower might well lie in the fact that 50 to 60 per cent of the slaves usually died during the passage from Africa to the New World. Packed in the holds of the galleries, one above the other, the slaves were given no more than four or five feet in length and two or three feet in height so that they could neither lie at full length nor sit upright. They were chained, right hand to left leg, and attached in rows to long iron bars. In this position they spent the months of their fetid voyage, coming up once for less than a minute to empty their pails of vomit and excrement. The close proximity of so many naked human beings, their bruised and festering flesh, the prevailing dysentery and the general accumulation of filth made it impossible for any European to stay in the holds for more than a few minutes without fainting. The Africans fainted and recovered, or fainted and died. During the storms, the hatches were battened down and the heaving vessel hurled the slaves against their chains.6 Pierre de Vaissiere mentions the typical case of the captain who, held up by calms and adverse winds, poisoned his cargo and threw *the bodies overboard, and the other case of the captain who had some of his slaves killed and cooked to feed the others with their meat.7 Fear of their cargo bred a savage cruelty in the crew. One captain, to strike terror into the slaves, killed one of them and, dividing his entrails into 300 pieces, made each of the others eat a piece, threatening to kill those who refused to eat human flesh.8 When the surviving slaves arrived at the slave markets, they were examined for defects by the American buyers, then branded on both sides of their breast with a hot iron and shipped further inland. Life on the plantations was not so much different from life on the slave ships. Sir Harry Johnson, in The Negro in the New World, gives this characteristic encounter between a plantation owner named Souther and an average