Article Excerpt: "Retention and Preservation of African Roots in Jamaican Folk Music"

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents an excerpt from a 2000 article by Carter R. Stowell entitled "Retention and Preservation of African Roots in Jamaican Folk Music".

The content of this post is presented for historical, cultural, and folkloric purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Carter R. Stowell for this research and writing and thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
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Click the "Jamaican Revivalist Religion" tag below for more pancocojams post about that subject.

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ARTICLE EXCERPT
From https://debate.uvm.edu/dreadlibrary/stowell.html
"Retention and Preservation of African Roots in Jamaican Folk Music" by Carter R. Stowell, University of Vermont; August 4, 2000
...."Religion
"Central to every aspect of folk life are the religious overtones which pervade it. People in folk societies have not yet separated their religious beliefs from their secular activities." This quote from Barrett’s 1976 work The Sun and the Drum: African Roots in Jamaican Folk Tradition contends that it is an exercise in abstraction to discuss Jamaica’s blend of African religions as a "component" of some lifestyle. Instead, there exists a peculiar gravity, perhaps a spiritual saturation, without which life itself is inconceivable. Some of the deepest rooted musical traditions are preserved within the context of religious practice, the ritual ceremonies that are part of this particular cosmology. In Jamaica, African folk religions served this purpose, even in combination with certain Christian denominations.

From 1655-1816, the Church of England made no attempt to Christianize the slaves. This policy reflected the hypocrisy of the Church at that time. Barrett writes, "the masters feared that the preachers… would stretch the equality of humanity before God a little too far." However, Christianity found its way into slave communities through the so-called nonconformist denominations — the Moravians in 1734, the Methodists in 1736, the Baptists in 1783, and the Presbyterians in 1823.

At the same time, a folk religion evolved out of a blend of African religions. The cult of Kumina was most affected by the Ashanti, the dominant ethnic group among the slaves. Kumina ceremonies which are called for births, deaths, marriages and other occasions involve vigorous dancing, drumming, a sacrifice, alcohol (typically rum) and ancestor-spirit possession. The spirit possession is critical. In this state, the possessed becomes a medium for a revelation communicated by an ancestor of the dancer or of the person who called the Kumina. The revelation is taken very seriously. In this way, neo-African cults and religions were a main preserver of music. The spirits are summoned by specific drum rhythms. This major role of music persists in Afro-American cults though the music itself may venture in new directions. As Roberts puts it, "slaves were not musically conservative or unenterprising." The result was a spirit-filled amalgam of Christianity and African folk religions invoking persecution by a fearful, established Church of England.

Christian fervor grew infectiously among Jamaica’s African population from emancipation through 1860 when a social phenomena dubbed the Great Revival swept across the island and across the Western world. Barrett writes, "The Great Revival allowed the African religious dynamic — long repressed — to assert itself in a Christian guise and capture what might have been a missionary victory." The Afro-Christian Revivalist sects used guitar, drums, cymbals and handclapping in emotionally charged worship services. At this point the music is essentially Jamaican, formed through a syncretism of African concepts, dynamism and sounds with European style verses and longer melody lines. So the overall sound might be called Euro/African in Roberts’ system. On the other hand, the energy of the worship service and ultimately the practice of the faith overwhelmingly favors the African contribution.

There is a symbolic element carried by the presence of the drum. The Church of England , had they encouraged Christianity among the slaves, would certainly have prohibited drumming at a worship service. For the Ashanti, the drum is among the tangible connections to an African heritage. The drum is the voice of God and a medium of worship. R.S. Rattray in his 1923 book Ashanti recounts the Ashanti story about the origins of drumming:

The Kokokyinaka is a beautiful dark bird that frequents the forest… Its call is not unlike the notes of the drums. It is every drummer’s totem, they claim clanship with it and would not eat or kill it. Its call is something like Kro kro kro kro ko kyini kyini kyini kro kyini ka ka ka kyini kyini kyini ka. The Ashanti say is taught them to drum.

Drumming is sacred to the Ashanti like the bird to the forest. Its voice called from Jamaica’s Revival yards, open courtyard spaces where worship services convened. Thus African traditions were reformulated, becoming truly Jamaican, and survived with remarkable clarity in the carriage of worship.

Preservation and Letting Go
Why does music die? Musical practices of West African nations and their Caribbean descendants, as discussed previously, are associated with specific functions. As a musical tradition loses its original function, crucial motivation is lost in participants. The music may find a new function or perish. Changes in music or the passage of a form can happen slowly and quite noticeably. For instance, when the younger generations in a culture fail to accept the traditions of their elders, a music which may have been significant in worship or folk medicine is bound for extinction. In the late nineteenth century, these extinctions were globally recognized; academics rushed in to observe and catalogue.

The effort did not begin in Jamaica, of course. Czechoslovakian-born, American academic Bruno Nettl, in his essay "The Concept of Preservation in Ethnomusicology" (1985), clarifies that 19th century collectors of non-Western music were not initially concerned with preservation. Not until students of European folk music wanted to preserve their own folk heritage did it become a practice. Scholars in Britain compiled an immense collection of Child Ballads. In North America, the Works Progress Administration sponsored publications of folk songs. By the late 19th century, music publications emerged to address the needs of the amateur musician. Books were published for teaching while people were urged to play and to dance to keep their heritage alive.

Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton’s Reggae: The Rough Guide (1997) — an anthology of Jamaica’s audio recordings — notes that musicologists recorded albums of Revival Zion music, work songs (called ring play or the ring game), and Jonkanoo. These efforts are generally considered "too little too late". Many of the forms were recorded post-mortem, the music’s function having turned entirely to self-preservation. However, recordings capture just a piece of musical culture: the artifact of sound, of tones and pulses.

Alan Merriam contributed a measure of rigor to the ill-defined field of ethnomusicology in his 1960 article "Ethnomusicology: Discussion and Definition of the Field". Merriam offers a definition — "the study of music in culture or as culture" — with a model of music having three components: concept, behavior and sound. Nettl observes an overwhelming concentration on sound: archives of transcription and recording lacking a sufficient compliment of documentation regarding the when, where, how and why of performances or the styles they have created or represented. To this day, there is no consensus regarding methodologies of musical preservation.

The issue of preservation is further complicated by a search for identity and reclamation of dignity. This dynamic, in Jamaica and also in Caribbean studies in general, leads to an emphasis on the differences between two musical macrosystems, Africa and Europe. While this pragmatic approach is arguably oversimplified, it hopefully lends insight and context to more granular approaches. Nettl’s 1985 essay offers a summarized history of preservation:

Perhaps the history of preservation travels along a continuum, beginning with attempts to make large authentic collections, just for the record, to practical collecting for educational use (in a broad sense), then to the urgent efforts to preserve what would soon disappear, and finally to a realistic, if resigned, way of looking at music as such an enormous quantity of cultural data that only selective samples can be taken and preserved.

The urgency for preservation, manifest in non-Jamaicans, did eventually touch the island. In successive visits during 1919 and 1921, Martha Warren Beckwith collected Jamaican "Anansi" stories from over sixty native informants. Miss Helen Roberts accompanied Beckwith in 1921 to record the music and the "magical effect of song which, at least in the old witch tales, far surpasses that in the action of the story." Among the Ashanti of Ghana, anansi is a spider. Beckwith, in her preface, compares the Anansi stories to the Hare of Bantu lore which became Brer Rabbit in the United States. These folk tales have been interpreted to represent the power of the ancestors to take on animal forms. The exposure of these stories through publication has offered the outsider one more clue reflecting the complexity of Jamaican folk culture which developed with a keen spiritual awareness originating in West Africa.

Closing Thoughts
Hundreds of Twi words of the Ashanti remain in the dialects of Jamaican peasants. A few elderly people sing Yoruba songs in the parish of Westmoreland. Folk forms of the lower class have percolated upward through societal classes, taking on more sophisticated musical elements. As a music is enjoyed by the upper class or the elite, a creole form may be tied to nationalism, evidenced by Jamaican reggae music. No effort at preservation has suspended the rapid transformation of Jamaican culture and music though archetypal connections to the past are concocted, enshrined and challenged.

In the later studies of Captain Rattray (1881-1938), published as Religion and Art in Ashanti (1954), he recounts this Ashanti tale,

Many Ashanti think that the ‘man in the moon’ is a drummer; children are warned not to watch him too long lest they should see him lay his drumsticks upon his drums, when it is thought they would die.

The same moon this evening might stand as a reminder of what is distant and practically imaginary in contrast to what is palpable. Landing on the moon and tasting its soil is not the same as knowing or even understanding it. Similarly, the conclusions of a cultural examination lacking direct experience is, at best, supplementary to voices of the culture itself. Mindful of this predicament, a world community can still benefit from such discourse so long as the ‘man in the moon’, like the Kumina drummers of Jamaica, maintains the rhythm."

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