The record changer (Jan-Dec 1944)

The Record Changer, July 1944 Negro in his series of bitter rebellions which set the final stamp of practical enforcement on the verbose documents of abolition and emancipation. Just as the disease which is most painful to the afflicted patient often represents the most interesting case to the doctor in attendance, so the most painful social afflictions and tyrannies of mankind often represent the most instructive cases for the historian. The historical research worker, unlike his more fortunate colleagues in other fields of scientific research, has no possibility of undertaking laboratory experiments, but he is fortunate in that history sets up her own laboratory experiments during periods of crisis, oppression and rebellion. Like vivisection, these experiments are painful and unpleasant, but they are our most important source of knowledge on our own group behavior. The most significant, and perhaps the most painful of these gigantic experiments of social vivisection during the last four hundred years, was the cutting-up of West-African tribes and their transplantation to the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. It was the first case to permit a methodical investigation of some of the most pertinent problems of anthropology: 1. Are cultures and civilizations racial achievements? 2. Are they innate and inherited or are they produced postnatally by environment and education? 3. To what extent does the social patetrn influence the cultural pattern? 4. To what extent does the cultural pattern influence the social pattern? 5. What evidence can be deduced for a sociology of culture? Or, to translate these questions into terms of music: 1. Was African music of the seventeenth century a general racial and tribal achievement or avas it a monopoly and special achievement of some special caste or social group within the tribe? 2. Was African music innate and inherited in the individual or was it going to change and develop in a different social and geographical environment? 3. To what extent did the social pattern of slavery and plantation labor influence the development of Negro music in America? 4. To what extent did the existence of 40 American Negro music influence the social pattern of its surroundings? 5. In terms of a sociology of music: a. How much of the Africans' music was preserved in America? b. What influences were active on the retention of the African musical heritage, and what influences were active on its relinquishment? c. How much did the music of the Americans — Indian, English, French, Spanish, Dutch, etc. — influence the music of the Negroes? d. Vice versa: How much did the music of the Africans influence that of the Americans — Indian, English, French, Dutch, Spanish — and in what way did the reactions of these groups differ from each other? e. What were the social influences responsible for the development of new branches of Afro-American music from slave songs to jazz? These are the questions we shall try to answer during the coming months. REFERENCES QUOTED 1 L. C. Gray : History of Agriculture in Southern U. S. A., vol. II, p. 1025. 2 Ibid., vol. I, p. 308-309. Bruce: Economic History of Virginia, vol. II, p. 57. Phillips: American Negro Slavery, p. 75. 3 Where the soil was unsuitable for cotton and sugar, slavery was virtuously frowned upon and abolitionist argument flowered. Thus it was not the "meddling Yankee' but the good mountaineer of North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee who carried the spearhead of abolitionism, forming slave-aid societies and building the first stations of the underground railroad — proving — if still furthe proof was needed — that abolitionism was an economic rather than a humanitarian movement. Cf. C. L. R. James: A History of Negro Revolt, p. 27. 4 Gray, op. cit., vol. I, p. 335. 5 Apthker: American Negro Slave Revolts, Science and Society, vol. II, No. 4, p. 514. Other references supra and infra are sub-quoted from this source. 6 C. L. R. James: The Black Jacobins, p. 3. 7 De Vaissiere: Saint Domingue, Paris, 1909, p. 162. 8 Ibid. 9 Gray, op. cit., vol. I, p. 335. 10 Apthker, op. cit., gives a list of dates and places of Negro rebellions, year by year, from 1663 to 1865. 11 New York Weekly Tribune, September 22, 1885. Lauber: Indian Slavery, p. 290. Keith: Chronicles of Pennsylvania, vol. II, p. 505. 12 Colonial Records of Georgia, vol. I, p. 50. Scarborough: Opposition to Slavery in Georgia, pp. 9, 12, 37, 73. 13 Wallace, Henry Laurence: p. 82. Channing: History of the United States, vol. II, p. 391. Annual Report of the American Historical' Association, 1895, p. 657. 14 Apthker: op. cit., p. 530.