Traces of Africa in American Music

On the islands off the coast of Georgia, the Gullah Geechee culture of ex-slaves was isolated from the rest of the world by seawater and a thick dialect and thus retained a music closer to Africa than anywhere else in the United States. When we hear that music today, it’s as if we’re closer to that crucial moment when West African and Anglo-Celtic music began to mix and created the American music we have today. Even if we can never recapture that moment, some echoes of it are louder and truer than others.

When enslaved Africans first arrived in the Western Hemisphere, dragged in chains off European sailing ships, some of the newcomers brought along a musical genius that used whatever instruments and opportunities they could get their hands on. Out of great cruelty they created great art. Almost no documentation of that process remains, so we have to comb through later music for the oldest traces of Africa.

That’s why this year’s release of Complete Friends of Old Time Music Concert, an April 9, 1965, performance at the New School in Manhattan, is so revelatory. The main attraction was the Georgia Sea Island Singers, a Gullah quintet that employed handclaps, hand percussion and call-and-response vocals to make music that retained more of its African character than most African-American music in the 20th century. They sang in English but in a dialect that borrowed grammar and vocabulary from West Africa.

Bessie Jones, the group leader, explains on the album the complicated handclapping patterns that give the music its syncopation. The other singers respond to her sturdy soprano with uncommon harmonies in fourths. The lead male singer is John Davis, who boasts a bottomless bass voice that reminds one of Howlin’ Wolf. When Davis bellows out the old stevedore song, “Goodbye My Riley O,” one can hear both the rhythmic exertion needed to move heavy cargo and the yearning for something better.

Also performing at the 1965 concert were Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ed Young, two bluesmen from that state’s northern hill country. This area, just east of the Delta, was also isolated by rugged terrain, poverty and racism, and its music too retained much of its African origins. With its knotty rhythms and trance-like drones, hill-country blues has more in common with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure than Chicago blues.

McDowell, a guitarist whose composition “You Gotta Move” was recorded by the Rolling Stones, is a giant of the music, a link between early pioneers like Bukka White to later figures like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside. The latter’s grandson, Cedric Burnside, keeps the flame burning on this year’s album, Hill Country Love. Young played the fife, a kind of flute hand carved from sugar cane, with fluttering melodies over rumbling, African rhythms, much like the better known Otha Turner.

On the 1965 recording, McDowell sings “Shake ‘Em on Down,” a dance number originally recorded by Bukka White and later done by the North Mississippi Allstars, and plays a stinging slide-guitar solo. On the gospel number, “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning,” he’s joined by the Georgia Sea Island Singers, demonstrating that they’re all close enough to their African origins to blend easily.

The call-and-response vocals that enslaved Africans brought with them became a foundation of African-American church music. So when Ray Charles transformed that music into secular songs that became known as “soul,” that back-and-forth was preserved in his interaction with the Raelettes, his female back-up singers, most notably on hits such as “What’d I Say” and “Hit the Road, Jack.”

After his early hits for Atlantic and ABC Records, Charles formed his own label, Tangerine Records, to control his own financial destiny. He recovered the rights to his ABC Records and reissued them on Tangerine. Those records have sometimes been hard to find, but five of them have just been remastered and reissued. The focus in this batch is on the albums that Charles made by taking country songs and Africanizing them. “I was just singing songs I’ve always loved,” Charles says in Willie Nelson’s autobiography, It’s a Long Story. As a kid growing up in the Florida backwoods, I loved listening to the Grand Ole Opry. The natural fact of the matter is that I’m country—deep country.”

Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music and Volume Two of the same yielded four Top 10 pop singles and proved that country music and the blues, which had branched away from each other in the early 20th century, could be reverse-engineered and brought back together again. The words and music were written by Buck Owens, Hank Williams and Don Gibson, but the push-and-pull rhythms and the Raelettes’ answering vocals allow Charles to roam wildly across octaves and bar lines while the rest of his band kept the groove going. It’s not so different from how John Davis sang over the Georgia Sea Island Singers.

The best album of the batch is 1966’s Crying Time, which takes its title from Owens’ masterful break-up ballad. The bulk of the record, though, is devoted to blues compositions, both old ones recorded by Bobby “Blue” Bland and Charles Brown as well as newer songs by Ashford & Simpson and Percy Mayfield. On these, Charles takes the melodic storytelling of country music and applies it to material closer to the Black church and the Motherland of it all. This blending of different musics from different immigrant groups to North America resulted in a fusion that changed the world. Such integration, as Charles proved, could produce splendid results. But there is also value in isolated communities who preserve older traditions that have been lost elsewhere. That was true of the Georgia sea islands and the Mississippi hill country, and it’s also true of the planet Saturn.

At least that’s what Sun Ra wanted us to believe. Though he was born in Alabama as Sonny Blount, Sun Ra insisted that he had come to Earth from Saturn with a treasure lode of music that sounded a lot like Africa. Apparently, on the ringed planet, they wear clothes that are fantastical versions of Egyptian and Senegalese styles and play horns that function like a choir gone crazy. And they play drums, lots of drums, including the tall African drum that Sun Ra called the Ancient Infinity Drum, played by James Jacson with two curved sticks.

On July 23, 1978, these travelers from Saturn visited Baltimore, Maryland. A recording of that early evening’s performance has now been released for the first time as Lights on a Satellite: Live at the Left Bank. The Left Bank Jazz Society was an integrated, non-profit group that brought top jazz acts to Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom every Sunday at 5 pm in the 1970s. I attended many of those shows, including this one. The Famous Ballroom was the most welcoming venue for live music I’d ever experienced. Patrons were allowed to bring their own food and drinks for a Sunday dinner at the long banquet tables set up throughout the large room. Or you could buy inexpensive soul food at one corner or reasonable drinks and set ups at another corner. The ceiling was painted so stars twinkled out of a purple sky. Strangers of all races sat side by side at the long table, united by a love for—and knowledge of—jazz.

Left Bank had hosted the last concert of John Coltrane’s life, but their usual fare tended to the hard-bop of Horace Silver or Art Blakey or the soul-jazz of Jimmy Smith or Lou Donaldson. So Sun Ra was a stretch for many of the regulars, and as his Myth Science Arkestra meandered through percussion jams, horn freakouts and abstracted piano solos, one could see the church ladies in the crowd, fidgeting with their handbags and coats, getting ready to leave, while their husbands grumbled, “They can’t even play.”

It was just at that fraught moment that the band launched into flawless, high-propulsion versions of “Yeah Man” and “Big John’s Special,” both arranged and recorded by Sun Ra’s greatest hero—and former employer—Fletcher Henderson. The ladies slipped their coats back off, the men grinned, and everyone settled into their chairs. It was obvious these musicians “could play,” so why were they doing all this other stuff? They were doing it because life in 1970s America was so discordant and challenging that the music had to reflect that and because wrestling order out of such chaos—as the band did again and again—is so much more dramatic than wrestling order out of order.

The reed section—John Gilmore on tenor, Marshall Allen on alto and Danny Ray Thompson on baritone—was one of the best in jazz at the time. Sun Ra died in 1993, Gilmore in 1995 and Thompson in 2020, but Allen celebrated his 100th birthday this year, and he still leads the extant version of the Sun Ra Arkestra. The band has just released a new album, confusingly also titled Lights on a Satellite.

Like the Mingus Big Band, the Allen-led Arkestra does a terrific job of keeping alive the music of a major composer and bandleader after his death. This new album presents a 24-musician version of the Arkestra recorded with much greater clarity than was usual with the budget-strapped studio and live recordings while Sun Ra was alive. The 10 tracks include seven Sun Ra compositions—many of them rarely heard before—and three popular tunes that were often part of the original Arkestra’s setlists. Just as Charles loved country music, Sun Ra loved 1930s dance music.

The 2024 album carries over just two performers (Allen and trumpeter Michael Ray) and two tunes (the title track and “Big John’s Special”) from the 1978 Baltimore recording. Allen is still a remarkable soloist, and he has hired talented musicians for every chair. Their professionalism sometimes blunts the original band’s otherworldly surprises—so evident on the 1978 live tape—but makes a compelling case for the musical substance of Sun Ra’s writing underneath the theatrics and sonic effects. Sometimes you don’t have to live in an area as isolated as the Georgia Sea Islands or the Mississippi Hill Country to connect with traditional African music. Sometimes you can live in the Virginia suburbs of D.C. That’s what happened to Yasmin Williams, who listened to her parents’ Earth, Wind & Fire records and became entranced by the group’s song, “Kalimba Story.”

The 1974 single showcases the African thumb piano, the kalimba. Held in both hands and manipulated by both thumbs like a smart phone, the small wooden box with metal strips suspended over an open hole produces a percussive, buzzing melody. Trying to produce that sound on her acoustic guitar, she laid the guitar flat in her lap and learned to tap on it as if it were a piano. Eventually she obtained an actual kalimba and attached it to her guitar with Velcro so she could play both instruments during the same song.

It wasn’t just that she used an unusual technique to produce an unusual sound; Williams soon demonstrated a gift for composing spellbinding instrumental melodies. That ability rises to a new level on her latest album, Acadia, with nine original compositions of greater complexity and length than ever before. She doesn’t play the kalimba on this project, but she uses her kalimba-derived tapping technique and such instruments as kora, calabash and banjo to keep the connection to Africa alive.

At the same time, however, she expands the scope of her sound by inviting guests from different fields. A string quartet joins her on the seven-minute “Sisters,” while jazz stars Immanuel Wilkins and Marcus Gilmore pull her in their direction on “Malamu.” Darlingside and Aoife O’Donovan add vocals to two numbers, and two other numbers add synths. And Dom Flemons plays rhythm bones on the opening track, “Cliffwalk.” When integrated into Williams’ astonishing playing and composing, these new musical flavors make Acadia a 21st century rarity: a non-jazz, non-classical instrumental triumph.

Flemons, of course, was a co-founder—with Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson—of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an acoustic string trio that highlighted the lingering African presence in the rural music of the American South. Giddens turned up the illumination even further when she played the introduction to “Texas Hold ‘Em,” Beyonce’s first single off Cowboy Carter, on a fretless banjo, the transitional instrument between the West African akonting and the fretted, steel-rimmed banjo we know today.

That transition—from one continent to the next, largely undocumented at the time—was crucial to this music we call American. We should grab hold of any reminder of that past we can find.