Islamic Music in Africa
As in many other Muslim lands, Sufism, the mystical side of Islam, spread widely in West Africa. One of its distinctive features was-and still is-music. Viewed as a means to bring an individual or a group closer to God, music is an integral part of Sufi life, following the injunction of the hadith "Adorn the Qur'an with your voices." Members of Sufi orders routinely chant the Qur'an and religious hymns. Supplications are also a genre, consisting of prayers chanted in an emotional way. Another genre is the high art of tilāwah, the recitation of the Qur'an performed by specialists who follow strict rules of pronunciation and intonation and always chant solo. Although Islamic traditions do not consider the recitation of the Qur'an and the call to prayer as singing, both are nevertheless melodic.
Strong trembling sounds, melisma (changing the note of a syllable while it is being sung), wavy intonations, elongated notes, long pauses between sentences, glissandos, and a certain nasality are characteristic features of reciting and singing in the Islamic world. Or as ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl described it, >"Middle Eastern singing is tense-sounding and has a harsh, throaty, nasal tone, with a certain flatness."1
Unsurprisingly, music was among the cultural exchanges that took place between North Africa and the western Sahel, defined here as the area stretching from Senegal/Gambia to northern Nigeria. Music in North Africa was distinctly different from music in the Middle East, having been influenced by the indigenous black populations living in the southern parts of the Maghreb and later by non-Muslim victims of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Often employed as musicians, these enslaved West Africans brought their music and rhythms to North Africa. In western Sahel, especially in the urban zones, Muslims adopted, adapted, and transformed the Islamic musical style. Much cross-fertilization occurred on both sides of the desert.
In the Muslim areas of West Africa, the lower caste of professional musicians attached to courts or wealthy families developed a repertoire of genealogies, praise songs, and epics. They sang solo -or sometimes in groups-in a declamatory style, with wavy inflections, melisma, humming, tremolo or vibrato, and throbbing or quavering effects. This style, centuries old, continues to be heard in contemporary music. Professional singers accompany themselves or are accompanied by musicians playing string instruments, such as lutes, one-string fiddles, the kora (a twenty-one-string harp), and balafons (xylophones)
Musicologist Gerhard Kubik places this model into the larger context of music in the Islamic world:
- Stylistically, the music played in the west African savanna hinterland, such as, for example, on certain stringed instruments, especially the long-necked lutes (xalam, garaya, etc.) and one-stringed fiddles (goge, goje, riti, etc.), is characterized by the predominance of pentatonic tuning patterns, the absence of the concept of asymmetric time-line patterns, a relatively simple motional structure lacking complex polyrhythm but using subtle off-beat accents, and a declamatory vocal style with wavy intonation, melisma, raspy voices, heterophony, and so on. Some of these characteristics are, of course, shared with the broader realm of Islamic music.2
Even when this type of music involves drums, it is clearly distinct from the music of the African coastal and forest areas. It is characterized by a strong reliance on drums, bells, rattles, polyrhythm, collective participation, and call-and-response, and is found in the southern parts of Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria, as well as West Central Africa from Gabon to Congo and Angola.
Instrumental Blues Style
In addition to the singing style, the instrumental dimension of the blues presents certain traits that some musicologists attribute to western Sahel. According to John Storm Roberts,
- The parallels between African savanna-belt string-playing and the techniques of many blues guitarists are remarkable. The big kora of Senegal and Guinea are played in a rhythmic-melodic style that uses constantly changing rhythms, often providing a ground bass overlaid with complex treble patterns, while vocal supplies a third rhythmic layer. Similar techniques can be found in hundreds of blues records. 37
But not all African-derived features of the blues can be traced back to this region. Kubik has outlined the areas from which he thinks other elements may come. The "intensity zone of monochord zithers and slider technique"-what became the slide guitar-can be found, he states, from southern Benin to Congo. And "areas with mouth-bows played with the stave directed towards the player's lips"-the American diddley bow and mouth-bow-are prevalent in Angola and Mozambique.38 In addition, Gioia proposes the interesting hypothesis that the repetition of the first line in many blues is an adaptation of call-and-response, the solo singer providing both the call and the response.39
Islamic Practices and the Blues
Musicologists such as Lomax, Kubik, Charters, Oliver, and others who found the roots of the blues in the West African Islamic belt envisioned this lineage as musical styles brought over by musicians. What they did not see is a direct link with specific Islamic practices that survived in the Americas, such as prayers, the recitation of the Qur'an, Sufi chants, and the call to prayer
In Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, I have shown that Muslims continued to adhere, as best they could, given the circumstances, to their religion, its precepts, and its practices. Prayers, fasting, dietary restrictions, charity, literacy, and dress, for example, endured, secretly or openly. Slaveholders, travelers, and writers, as well as enslaved non-Muslims, witnessed and reported some of these manifestations of religious piety, without necessarily understanding them as such.
An incident that took place in Sierra Leone in the late 1780s illustrates what most likely occurred on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean:
- In the neighboring slave-yard, I saw a man about 35 years old in irons. He was a Mahometan, and could read and write Arabick. He was occasionally noisy; sometimes he would sing a melancholy song then he would utter an earnest prayer, and then would observe a dead silence.40
The melancholy song may have been the musical
recitation of the Qur'an or a Sufi chant: the young man calling on his faith's oral expression to assuage his despair. On American farms and plantations, Qur'anic recitations and Sufi chants, done solo or in small groups, would have sounded just like songs. And so too would the call to prayer, the adhan. The words of the adhan are the same everywhere, but each call has a distinctive sound, characteristic of each place. It will sound different in, say, Uzbekistan and Senegal. Perhaps the most striking holler in that regard came from Bama, the star singer of Parchman prison. Like the adhan, his "Levee Camp Holler," recorded by Lomax as late as 1947-a sign of the genre's longevity-could have floated from a minaret. It is almost an exact match to the call to prayer by a West African muezzin. It features the same ornamented notes, elongated syllables sung with wavy intonations, melismas, and pauses. When both pieces are juxtaposed, it is hard to distinguish when the call to prayer ends and the holler starts. It was most likely these audible expressions of Muslim faith, and not merely what the musicians brought over, that generated the distinctive African American
music of the South.41
The blues is generally understood as a secular music of loss: lost women, lost jobs, regrets, and defeat. But it has a more profound, spiritual side: defying despair. In the 1950s, Ralph Ellison, while writing about flamenco-another Islamic-influenced music- remarked that the "blues voice mocks the despair stated explicitly in the lyric, and it expresses the great human joke directed against the universe, that joke which is the secret of all folklore and myth: that though we be dismembered daily we shall always rise up again."42For theologian James Cone, the blues is "a secular spiritual."43 In this spirituality, perhaps one may find an echo of one of the blues's roots in Islamic practices and music.
The blues is not African music; there is no traditional "African blues." Nor is it "Islamic music." The blues is an African American creation, born of American circumstances and various influences. What makes it unique is the prevalence of a number of Sahelian/ Islamic stylistic elements that became dominant due in part to historical events particular to American slavery. One, the Stono uprising, was an attack on the system in the pursuit of freedom. Another, the uprooting of a million people, was engineered to feed the monstrously violent development of slavery in the Deep South. Still another was the virtual re-enslavement of the post-Emancipation period. To resist the onslaught of these cruel historical circumstances, African Americans used all the cultural tools that best allowed them to express their suffering and hope, to comfort themselves, and to help them cope. Among these were the soulful tunes of the hollers and the blues. Though largely unrecognized, they are some of the most enduring contributions of West African Muslims to American culture.
