Article responses Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Article responses - Essay Example He suggests that this particularly divisive time created animus within the African-American population, propagated by the notion that much of what was "Negro" was by definition inferior to White culture. In this crucible of division the musical form that would come to be known as the Blues would be born and judged by various groups. This paper will summarize and comment on Barakas aka Jones reflections of this period of musical and cultural history. In a culture that regards a particular population so thoroughly inferior, the slave mentality bends under this oppressive distinction and begins to loathe itself. The music born out of that period reveals the changing economic and political conditions that self-emancipation brings, and how that shifting ground translates musically. Initially, the African chants and hollers that occupied slave music was counter-posed with Anglo-Saxon Protestant hymnals that at times were lifted directly from the hymn books themselves. The freedom to Africanize words, and the learning of American English resulted in some interesting phraseology to develop in the chants and lyrics that would eventually become the blues. Furthermore, the difficulties in finding rhymes because of the apparent restriction that a inchoate though developing mastery of English entailed resulted in the repetitive structure that would come to typify the blues form. The need to be able to produce music that was understandable t o the American population at large was a manifestation of the recently emancipated slave populations that realized that this musical form could extend across the country rather than just across the plantation fields. Yet, the Blues maintained its intensely personal form, a form that it would never lose, as the desire to escape the mainstream White American prejudice would continue to psychologically alienate blues musicians. Jones contends that this alienation is not as