Project Statement Researching African Diaspora: Untangling the Interlaced Ambiguities of the Blues Fulbright Core Scholar Application

(Regional) Karen M. Wilson, Ph.D. Project Rationale [Note: Before the mid twentieth century, rural Blues in the United States was not restricted to the 8, 12 and 16 bar forms that later developed in urban centers. (Courlander, 1963; Stearns, 1958) For the purposes of this discussion, the Blues will be considered both as formal genre and, when freed of formal aspects, as a set of strategies and approaches representing pan-African cultural presence in the Western Hemisphere and focusing, in this case, on the United States. I will refer to this earlier development as the Historical Blues.] By looking at two multi-ethnic and cross-generational arms of African cultural development (one, among the Akan of Ghana; and the other, among multi-ethnic communities of Akwa Ibom and Cross River, Nigeria) and one African diasporic arm in the Western Hemisphere (as reflected in the Historical Blues in the United States) we may be able to posit which elements of African source material flowed into the Western Hemisphere during the transatlantic slave trade. Such approaches and strategies represented by the Blues evident in both twenty-first century genre and earlier historical sources would include spiritual practice, community building, psychological support, and kinesthetic action inseparable from musical performance. Project Overview The Harlem of my youth was a black town an African American social and cultural space. In 1956 when I was four, we little children played: [original included notation] Head and shoulders, baby, one two three The bigger kids played Walkin down the alley, alley, alley/Walkin down the alley, all night long and Amalama cumala, cumala, bee-stay in which one child sang out the line and then everyone else answered in kind. The songs we sang as we played these games had us swooping up to our pitches or gliding around flat thirds, fifths, sevenths or sixths as we clapped and danced our way down the alley or rolled our small hips around the world. We made rhythms that interacted with each other, built around four beat measures that accentuated beats two and four instead on one and three as European childrens songs such as Frere Jacques or Go Tell Aunt Rhodie would have had us do. As we wagged our hips and flipped our backbones, we drew on a repertoire of movement that fell within the guidelines for creativity and improvisatory freedom learned from emulating older friends and family members. Friends sent to grandmothers and aunties in such southeastern states as North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia during the summers could play the same or similar games with their cousins down South. African Diasporic communities all over the United States played, sang, danced and interacted according to these well understood and profoundly integrated rules for dance, for music and for play. (Edet, 1978; Courlander, 1963; Jones and Hawes, 1972; Twining, 1995)

Certainly, the thought of playing these particular games and many others without singing and dancing would have been incomprehensible to us. As we played, we were being taught that music (whether principally melodic or rhythmic) was inseparable from movement. In African diasporic social settings in the United States, and in other parts of the Diaspora in the Western Hemisphere, such inseparability is seldom broken. Traditional childrens games often carry and preserve traditional culture. In our case, our games were teaching us the musical and kinesthetic elements of the Historical Blues. Some thirty years later, I was surprised to find an article by musicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia, African Music which described many elements of the song and dance I had learned as a child. His discussion addressed aspects of continental pan-African aesthetic such as the range of acceptable musical sound among many African peoples and the inseparability of music from dance, and he was describing my socio-musical setting as well. He had laid out the histori-cultural connections between continental African cultural practice and the Historical Blues. Project Statement When a musician born in the 1860s told Marshall Stearns, The blues was here when I come, (Stearns, 1958, 105) to what did he refer? It is unlikely that this person meant the eight, twelve, or sixteen bar form that has become inseparable from the discussion of the genre when as late as the mid 1950s some rural blues musicians were decrying such formal treatment and that of set, chordal progressions (103). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, these elements are considered the very definition of the genre. Perhaps the Blues these musicians were referencing was not a genre at all. I argue that the Blues is more than a genre defined by formal musical, or even poetic, characteristics. The Historical Blues represents the result of the action and interaction of multiple cultural strategies that entered the Western Hemisphere with various African peoples between the 16th and 19th centuries. Through cultural negotiation, these approaches and strategies eventually developed into a set of practices and functions we have come to call the Blues. These strategies include call and response; simple, interlocking rhythms that create multi-layered and complex pulse systems; driving rhythm; fragmentation (often connected to referencing, or sampling); inseparability of music and movement (Wilson, 1985); improvisation, communal creation and multiple foci of power (Berliner, 1994,); cool (Thompson, 1983), active witness (Chernoff, 1979), angularity (Malone, 1996), and a persistent sense of flow. 3 Although the previous list reflects only musical characteristics, the Historical Blues reflects other markers of African cultural presence as well. They include spiritual practice as unified with what the West would consider secular sensibility, civic involvement and the building of community, and psychological uplift all functions that accompany the Historical Blues. Such characteristics might not generally be considered unified functions in Western cultural practice. I argue, however, that just as sacred and secular are traditionally considered unified in African philosophy and theology and divergent in that of Europe, we need to reassess these functions in African and African diasporic cultural practice. In its distilled form, the Historical Blues reflects all of these functions in community.

Further, I insist that these cultural negotiations did not begin in diaspora, but in cultural contact on the continent of Africa itself. This has taken (and still takes) place in regions where peoples of

differing ethnic groups have come together in close proximity over long periods of time. One such model of continental, multi-ethnic cultural negotiation and adaptation appears in the centuries old Leopard Society as it developed in the Akwa Ibom and Cross River States of present day Nigeria. In Leopard Society, we see the spiritual, civil, economic, and governmental functions come together in Abakpa/Ejagham innovations that have been adopted and adapted by the Ibibio, Efut, Efik, and other groups as well. (Talbot, 1912, Thompson, 1983) In the case of the Akan of present day Ghana, such peoples as the Ashanti, the Fante, the Akuapem, the Baoule, the Chokosi and a number of others came together for various political, economic, social and military reasons over time, choosing to negotiate and take on an overarching identity as Akan. With this identity came constant cultural negotiations resulting, in part, in the musical practices about which Professor Nketia has written so effectively. In each case, differing peoples have negotiated, making agreements to adopt certain cultural practices, dropping some and changing others to create a new kind of cultural practice that will serve everyones purposes even while it continues to change. It is exactly for this reason, then, that one cannot return to Africa to find raw materials or roots. Africa, never having been isolated, inward looking, geographically cut-off, or culturally frozen, has never stopped changing and undergoing transformations of its own. Still, attempts to identify trajectories of traditional approaches to aesthetic and practice may be possible, in part, by comparing childrens traditional games, dances and songs in international African settings and in the southeastern United States. With the African childrens traditions contributing to two legs of the triangle, and the African Diasporic childrens repertoire in the United States forming the other, I expect to be able to identify some of the similar cultural practices in both settings, particularly when we examine childrens music-making practices as children transition into music-making adults. I would also like to look at the effects on the genre of the Blues when it returned to Africa by investigating performance practice and local innovation among Ghanaian and Nigerian musicians. Happily, there is a researcher in Ghana whose scholarship has long addressed cross-cultural contact and the diversity of traditions in West Africa.
J. H. Kwabena Nketia, the founding director of the International Centre for African Music and Dance, is a composer and musicologist specializing in Akan music, dance and the social contexts within which such cultural practice occurs. Even more importantly, Dr. Nketia has researched and extrapolated from multi-ethnic Akan musical practice to articulate theories of the deep structures that underlie many African musics. Although nearing ninety and emeritus, Dr. Nketia is an active scholar, traveling the world to present at conferences and symposia. He has offered me the opportunity to collaborate with him on the investigation of these issues in order to study the aesthetic and practical connections between African communities and the descendent communities of Africans in diaspora. An extended period of time at the ICAMD would give me the opportunity to work with Dr Nketia on questions of African musicological history and cultural practice. I have worked with Dr. Nketias scholarship for many years and for 4 this reason would consider it an honor to have the opportunity to consult with him on a number of these issues. Project Methodology Scholarly investigation will include both archival research and participant observation. Archival research will be transdisciplinary in nature and conducted in the archival collections of the University of Ghana, Legon and the University of Uyo, Nigeria. It will include primary documents (including audio and video recordings) and scholarship from such disciplines as anthropology, oral and written

political and economic histories, religious history, music and music history, dance and dance history, story, and ethnomusicology. I intend to research childrens games and songs in local schools and, with the help of community organizations, on playgrounds and other places where children play. Libraries and librarians often prove to be wonderful repositories of such repertoire as well. I will be making audio and video recordings at this time. I plan to attend festivals and other events that are open to the public and at which music that is considered traditional is being created and performed. I expect it to be helpful to hear and to learn what twenty-first century culture bearers consider traditional and innovative music to be. Research will also include performance practice and in this case I will act as both participant and observer. As a carrier and performer of African diasporic cultural practice from the United States, I intend to perform both by myself and to participate in performance with Ghanaian and Nigerian musicians active in both indigenous and diasporic forms such as Blues and Jazz. This important form of research allows the researcher access to cultural processes as they are happening and from the inside. Research Schedule and Plan I will spend the nine month period of the Fulbright in the following ways: Ghana: One month in Ghana to establish ways of work with Dr. Nketia in Ghana. This would also provide time to meet and begin work with international cultural specialists such as singers, instrumentalists, bards and scholars at the International Center for African Music and Dance, the School of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon. I would also begin reaching out to schools and communities that I had already contacted for introductions to teachers and to parent groups. Four months to branch out from Legon into areas of Ghana to visit schools to which I had gained introduction and where other specialists and scholars are active. Nigeria: One month to establish ways of work in Uyo, including identifying materials in the archive there and following up contacts to schools, teachers, parents and community groups Three months to move out and around Calabar to visit schools and other community settings were children play. I would also search out public festivals and other events at which appropriate opportunities to research Leopard Society musical practice would be available. I would also take this time to meet with scholars, attend public performances, and interact and perform with cultural practitioners such as singers, instrumentalists and bards. I would, however, like the flexibility to come back to Legon to confer with Dr. Nketia, should this be advisable. Why Ghana as the Host Country? The University of Ghana, Legon houses the International Center for African Music and Dance as part of its School of African Studies. The ICAMD exists to make the investigation of disparate African musics possible. There could be no better place in which to base the query of the existence and development of multiple African cultures, their development over time, and their contributions to the

cultural stream that flowed into the western hemisphere between the 16th and 19th centuries through the transatlantic slave trade. Further, Dr. Nketias work in assessing the deep structure and complexity of African cultural practice and its embodiments in international settings has been fundamental to the conceptualization of this project. Collaboration with him and involvement with his scholarly and performing community is critical to this enterprise. Outcomes and Contributions African Diaspora Studies is a relatively new discipline. As such, it is still identifying reasonable objectives and the appropriate methodologies to achieve them. This scholarly community is only now working to clarify the nature of cultural change as it occurs in diaspora. In order to do so, it must solidify concepts of African history on which such concepts are built. This work, then, responds to the assertions first, that cultural contact between African peoples and cultural change as a result of that contact happened first and only in diaspora or, in other words, during the transatlantic slave trade as do anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price (Mintz and Price, 1976, 18-19; 1992, 32). This work would challenge and disprove that notion. Neither are we clear on the cultural networks and historical relationships between African diasporic sites in the Western Hemisphere; this work could assist in establishing those links. This work would also challenge religious historian Jon Butlers assertion of an African spiritual holocaust in colonial North America. (Butler, 1992, 129-163) This will bring historical, socio-cultural relationships between the homeland and the diaspora into clearer focus for historians, economists, political scientists and religious scholars. It will help to articulate conceptions of diasporic cultural development for those involved in such studies wherever in the world they occur. Project Dissemination I plan presentations discussing these issues of diasporic change and the antiquity and importance of the Historical Blues at such conferences as the Blues and the Spirit Symposium and the Society for the Study of Ethnomusicology, as well as the Organization of American Historians. Following the conference papers, I plan to produce an article for publication in a peer-reviewed journal such as the Journal of African American History or Ethnomusicology Finally, in the tradition of such public historians and intellectuals as Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, I will offer lecture/demonstrations at museums, in libraries and in other public venues. This information will be of interest both to the descendents of Africans in their homeland(s) and to Africans and their descendents throughout their diasporas. It also has resonance for the public outside of those communities who wish to clarify their sense of these historical developments and to appreciate the art forms that embody them more fully.