아프리카 블루스(African blues)는 주로 서아프리카에서 온 대중음악의 장르이다. 이 용어는 또한 고국에서 미국으로, 그리고 과거로 이어지는 전통적인 아프리카 음악에 의해 시작된 추정 여행을 가리키기도 한다.[1] 일부 학자들과 민족 음악 학자들은, 우울증의 원인이 아프리카계 미국인들이 노예 제도를 도입한 후에 지니고 있던 것과 같이, 아프리카의 음악적 전통으로 추적될 수 있다고 추측했다. 블루스가 미국 대중음악의 핵심 요소임에도 불구하고, 그것의 시골, 아프리카계 미국인 기원은 대체로 문서화되지 않았고, 그것의 아프리카 악기 전통과의 스타일적 연관성은 다소 미미하다.[2]
↑Oliver, Paul. “Blues”. 《Grove Music Online》. Oxford Music Online. 2015년 10월 3일에 확인함. From obscure and largely undocumented rural American origins, it became the most extensively recorded of all traditional music types... Since the early 1960s blues has been the most important single influence on the development of Western popular music... In its early years the blues was wholly African American... Influential in its development were the collective unaccompanied work-songs of the plantation culture, which followed a responsorial 'leader-and-chorus' form that can be traced not only to pre-Civil War origins but to African sources. Responsorial work-songs diminished when the plantations were broken up, but persisted in the southern penitentiary farms until the 1950s. After the Reconstruction era, black workers either engaged in seasonal collective labour in the South or tended smallholdings leased to them under the system of debt-serfdom known as sharecropping. Work-songs therefore increasingly took the form of solo calls or 'hollers', comparatively free in form but close to blues in feeling. The vocal style of the blues probably derived from the holler... Blues instrumental style shows tenuous links with African music. Drumming was forbidden on slave plantations, but the playing of string instruments was often permitted and even encouraged, so the musicians among slaves from the savanna regions, with their strong traditions of string playing, predominated. The jelli, or griots – professional musicians who also acted as their tribe’s historians and social commentators – performed roles not unlike those of the later blues singers, while the banjo is thought to be a direct descendant of their banza or xalam.(구독 필요)
