Africa and the Blues

by Gerhard Kubik

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani , a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own cultural heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between these two far-flung musicians is African-American music, the sound that became the blues.

Such discoveries reveal a narrative of music evolution for Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Traveling in Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States, he spent forty years in the field gathering the material for Africa and the Blues . In this book, Kubik relentlessly traces the remote genealogies of African cultural music through eighteen African nations, especially in the Western and Central Sudanic Belt.

Included is a comprehensive map of this cradle of the blues, along with 31 photographs gathered in his fieldwork. The author also adds clear musical notations and descriptions of both African and African American traditions and practices and calls into question the many assumptions about which elements of the blues were "European" in origin and about which came from Africa. Unique to this book is Kubik's insight into the ways present-day African musicians have adopted and enlivened the blues with their own traditions.

With scholarly care but with an ease for the general reader, Kubik proposes an entirely new theory on blue notes and their origins. Tracing what musical traits came from Africa and what mutations and mergers occurred in the Americas, he shows that the African American tradition we call the blues is truly a musical phenomenon belonging to the African cultural world.

Genres: Music, Jazz, History, Africa

260 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1999

About the author

Gerhard Kubik is an Austrian music ethnologist from Vienna. Kubik studied ethnology, musicology and African languages at the University of Vienna. He published his doctoral dissertation in 1971 and achieved habilitation in 1980.

Reviews

[JRT · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Africa and the Blues” by Gerhard Kubik does an excellent job demonstrating the West, Central, and Sahelian African cultural retentions at the foundation of American Blues. Kubik notes that while the Blues is a uniquely African *American* invention, its pioneers were not blank slates. Rather, they had certain cultural memories upon which to build from. While the book is highly technical and might frequently go over the heads of those who are not music theorists, it never strays to far from the thesis that the so-called “roots” of various Blues structures and components can be found in specific areas in Africa.

[t bannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most exhaustive analysis of the origin of the blues that I have ever come across. Written by an amazing musicologist, musician, performer, psychoanalyst, and researcher, Gerhard Kubik.
He makes the case that "The Blues" is a descendant of Western African music styles. BUT... much farther east into inland Africa nd influenced by the Islamic vocalizations - early African musical "scales" as well as east african instruments. The book gets very technical - you need a phd in music theory to follow the details. But this is a testament to Kubik's thoroughness and pursuit of the truth. The most interesting research ties the Blues vocalizations and the "Blue notes" NOT to musical antecedents but to actual language/linguistics heritage.
I dont agree with the author's conclusions that the Blues developed in the late 19th century following emancipation. I believe that "proto-blues" was a clandestine musical heritage kept out of sight and hearing of the plantation overseers for many generations if not centuries. It only came out of the shadows when it was relatively safe for blacks to sing in a vocalization that was anti-white european musicality. It was the rise of the black vaudeville in the late 1800's, performed for a black audience that set blacks free to sing in a natural style. It had been there all along. It was music of resistance and rebellion during Jim Crow era until it became recorded and nationalized in the 1920s.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5 kubiks on this one.