Soul Deep: African American Literature and Music

With the coming of the Great Depression during the 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance slowly faded. Yet, when Richard Wright published Native Son in 1940, African- American literature again experienced a radical change of direction. In his classic novel, Wright did not offer whites an image of black people with which they could be comfortable. A victim of racism, Bigger Thomas is defiant, angry, and mistrustful. For the next decade, African-American writers followed the path that Wright had charted, blending art with a growing political awareness that shaped the emerging Civil Rights movement.

African slaves brought with them to America musical traditions different from their European masters. Where Western music emphasized melody, African music concentrated on rhythm, with percussion instruments such as drums dominating. In addition to its intricate rhythmic patterns, the music of the African-American slaves was marked by distinctive characteristics such as call-and-response, improvisation, and dance. For the slaves, as for their African ancestors, music was a part of everyday life and the whole body was, after a fashion, a musical instrument. Even without accompaniment, the slaves could whistle, sing,
and pat out a rhythm with their hands. African-American also seemed to cover a
greater and deeper emotional range than European music, conveying both
joy and despair.

Yet, the blending of African and European cultures in America produced a distinctive set of musical forms and traditions that, if anything, have proven to be even more influential than African-American literature. The mingling of Spanish, French, Caribbean, and African cultures in particular has resulted in the emergence of salsa, calypso, samba, cumbia, Cajun, reggae, and zydeco, to say nothing of gospel, ragtime, blues, jazz, R & B, soul, rock, and rap. African people both assimilated to and, at the same time, transformed European musical idioms, which, in the words of Alan Lomax, a pioneering scholar of African-American music, surged "together like seaweed swinging with the waves or a leafy tree responding to a strong wind." From the Americanization of Africa and the Africanization of America arose these hybrid musical styles and genres that created the unmistakable sounds of the New World.

African-American literature and music thus offer the world a rich and diverse cultural legacy, which shows no signs of abating. What make these cultural forms even more powerful, however, are the two themes that dominate them: discontent, sadness, and alienation on the one hand and struggle, affirmation, and triumph on the other. These

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