Similarities Between African American Fife And Drum Music & Certain Traditional African Music and Other Traditional Music (YouTube discussion thread comments)

Alan Lomax Archive, May 21, 2012

Othar Turner's Rising Star Fife & Drum band (Turner, fife; G.D. Young, bass drum; E.P. Burton, snare; Eddie Ware, snare) playing a picnic at Othar's farm. Shot by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long in Gravel Springs, Mississippi, August 1978. For more information about the American Patchwork filmwork, Alan Lomax, and his collections, visit http://culturalequity.org ​. [02.08.10]

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Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part II of a two part pancocojams series about African American fife and drum music.

Part II of this pancocojams series showcases a video of Othar Turner & the rising star fife and drum band. 

This post also presents YouTube comments from several discussion threads about the similariries of African American fife and drum music and certain traditional African music and other traditional music.

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2021/03/two-examples-of-african-american-fife.html for Part I of this pancocojams post. That post showcases two YouTube examples of African American fife and drum music.

Thanks to Othar Turner and the musicians in his band and thanks to other African American fife and drum musicians for their musical legacies. Thanks to all those who are associated with these YouTube examples and thanks to all those who are quoted in this post. Thanks also to the publishers of these examples on YouTube.

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SELECTED COMMENTS ABOUT THIS SUBJECT
The YouTube discussion threads that these comments come from are given in no particular order.
Those discussion threads and those sources are numbered for referencing purposes only.

Discussion thread #1
Othar Turner and the Rising Star Fife & Drum Band - Shimmy She Wobble (1) 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDar1ymGbjg&t=32s&ab_channel=SamCollins

1. rachel king, 2012
"God bless the first enslaved Irishman for giving the first enslaved blackman a wooden fyffe  in Mississippi"

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2. Tize, 2012
"Why in the world should we African-Americans give thanks to an Irish or any european for preserving the African meloismatic and rhythmatic musical culture of our African ancestors?"

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3. Tize, 2012
"For anybody that thinks this music comes from anywhere in Europe, I suggest you go look up Fulani Flute and drum music, a genre played in West Africa. This is an extension of the music of our(African-Americans)" ancestors."

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4. Tize, 2012
"This is false. The physical construction of the blues fife played in Northern MS is based on an old African model brought over by the transatlantic slave trade. In fact the construction process mimics that of the of Fula, a West African instrument not any Irish tool brought by indentured servants.

Got to love these crazy eurocentric revisionist theories about *AFRICAN*-american culture.........."
-snip-
"Ms" = "Mississippi"

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5. 黑佛, 2013
"I wouldn't have thought the origin of this song to be African American. This was a unkown piece of my culture. I will look up Fulani flute and drum music, thank you."

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6. Ornella Friggit, 2014
"This reminds me a lot of Gurunsi music (from the south of Burkina Faso/north of Ghana)."

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7. Jack Moralee, 2013
"I personally feel this song in-particular show's a strong relationship with black Americans & Irish people during the 19th century & backwards."

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8. Tize, 2013
"This aside from the use of some western instruments, this music is primarily derived from West African fulani flute and drum music, basically an offshoot, it came from the Lower Chattahoochee Valley(Georgia/Alabama) to Mississippi probably some time during the domestic slave trade.

Fusions between African and Celtic/Anglo music can be heard in the Appalachian mountains hillbilly/bluegrass/country music."

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9. Jamesmartens55, 2013
"one could say the same about Rhodesia....

gotta love these afrocentric revisionist theories about EUROPEAN-African culture...."

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10. Tize, 2013
"What does Zimbabwe have to do with the fact that the Northern Mississippi fife & drum blues tradition is a descendant from the Fife and Drum blues in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, which itself is a descendant from the Fulani Flute and Drum tradition of West Africa, and the blues fife used is based on the folk construction of the Fula-Flute, a West African instrument?

Just message me, and I send you scholarly researched, peer-reviewed, sources to back it up."

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11. Shane Morris Music, 2019
"I'm curious what leads you to believe that N. Mississippi fife & drum blues is a descendant of the Lower Chattahoochee Valley tradition? Is there research or documentation for this? I'm more inclined to think that it occurred independently, evolving on it's own after the Civil War, as also in TN and MO."
-snip-
"TN" = "Tennessee"
"MO" = "Missouri"

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12. G Mc, 2013
"OK, is this not a mix of majority African music with some Celtic taste?"

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13. Sakhal Nakhash, 2018
"Yeah, more like a European military march."

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14. austin konrad, 2019
"[Gerard mc namara not at all my dearest friend..not at all] [Yeah, more like a European military march.] (profanity deleted) king dingbats,  this music is indistinguishable from Gurunsi music."

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15. Sadat Salifu, 2020
"Austin konrad I love this! I am Ghanaian and I know the flute sound is straight out of northern Ghana!"

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16. saprissa9, 2019
"Holy crap it's actually made by black folks? When I first heard it in the movie I really thought it was an Irish song."
-snip-
The movie that is referenced in this comment (and throughout that discussion thread is  "Gangs Of New York". Othat Turner & the Rising Star Fife & Drum Band's recording of Shimmy She Wobble" was part of that movie's opening sequence.

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17. Judy Jacobs, 2020
"Yes, there's a long tradition of ballads of many kinds in the South. Many of the early settlers had Scots-Irish roots, and the slaves they kept there learned the songs from those sources. Many of the songs sung and played by both black and white folks originated in collections such as the child Ballads. Otha used to host big community parties during which he'd butcher a goat and cook it in a big iron pot. The band was usually made up of his family members. Cool beans, right?"

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Discussion thread #2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyqf-jf2B_4&t=76s&ab_channel=AlanLomaxArchive
Othar Turner and the Rising Star Fife & Drum Band: Ida Reed (1978)

[This is the video that is embedded in this pancocojams post.] 

1. Gil Duarte Mokōî Ygarussu, 2013
"Very nice! The Otha, remember this bands of pifano in Brazil!!!

Banda de Pífano"

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2. B0bChorba. 2018
"This is 'Fife & Drum' music, early 19th century music, of course mixing African and white.  A beautiful mix that has been done for thousands of years folks.

You can hear Euro/British/Irish recreated & played well in the CD 'Marching Out of Time'  by The Fife & Drums of Colonial Williamsburg.  Welsh folk tunes, Purcell, well researched.

Could be heard in the Caribbean too.  Folkways released a CD sounding very good:  'Bongo, Backra, & Coolie, Vol. 2', recorded Jamaica 1975.

There was a fair bit recorded of this stuff in America, if you dig deep, North MS mostly.   Multi-instrumentalist Sid Hemphill, Napoleon Strickland, also compilation 'Traveling through the Jungle'.

There were also singers from the Georgia Sea Islands, where proper 18/19th century African roots could be heard sung most strongly, recorded in session with cane pipe and drum players from inland, Ed Young & Georgia Sea Island Singers."

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3. B0bChorba, 2018
"BTW This CD is definitely worth the money:

'From Ear to Ear, the Passage of African Music through American Slavery', again by Colonial Williamsburg.  Recreated, but done with much thought (and I suspect loads of research), as well as feeling."

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4. Cvp1969, 2018
"This is straight from Africa.."

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5. Benji, 2019
"This is American"

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6. Goo Gel, 2019
"Yes, but the connection to Africa is clear. Listen to any of Othar's music with the Afrossippi Allstars and you can hear Senegalese musical instruments. Drum(+wind instrument) music is also at the core of much Ghanaian and other African countries' traditional music."

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7. Mississippi Delta Medicine, 2020
"Native flute and drums. Mizi-Ziibi. Black Indigenous Americans. 🏹🏹🏹"

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8. Joel Z. Williams, 2018
"This is the most pure, authentic folk music that I have ever discovered in the course of 40 years of searching for a clear link between the West African Fife and Drum traditional music and the Gheechee"

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9. Eric, 2018
"Irish Funk"

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10. One Earth one People one Race, 2020
"This is Igbo drum and flute from South Eastern Nigeria"

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11. Mississippi Delta Medicine, 2020
"Black Indigenous Americans🏹🏹🏹"

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12. Bluesmusic Andwhatnot, 2021
"These guys aren't "Gheechee" and there was likely no "fife and drum traditional music" in West Africa at the time of the slave trade, although there was likely a barrage of music that combined wind instrument and drum/other percussion, with some of those traditions surviving today. It's debatable if they had any direct influence on this tradition however, even though the rhythm and intonation is strongly influenced by West African music in a broad sense. Given that, this isn't "Igbo drum and flute" either. It's a particular African American tradition that could have been influenced by numerous West African sources, but is also pretty clearly influenced by European fife and drum tradition (With them playing snares and basses with western drum sticks while "marching" in a straight line). 

It's more likely that this particular instance of combining percussion with flute was more directly influenced by European fife and drum, rather than anything in Africa, with the music itself being the thing that's distinctly African in it's origin. It's important to remember that the Africa today is a very different Africa from the one 400-200 years ago and that, overwhelmingly, African slaves were in a completely different cultural environment once they reached the Americas, with many different people taken from many different regions and ethnic groups finding themselves among each other. No particular tradition or set of customs survived, especially in North America. The traditions that did survive would have been common to a sleuth of different ethnic groups in Africa, and would have lost any individual meaning in the Americas and instead took on an entirely new, somewhat homogeneous one reflective of the distinctly American life and environment of the enslaved. This is all to say, while many African elements permeated and continue to permeate through out African American culture and especially music, it's near impossible to definitively trace the origin point of these elements back to anything in particular in Africa.
-snip-
I reformatted this comment to increase its readability. 

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13. Cathair Patrick, 2018
"That sounds really like African music. Really raw stuff."

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14. Sandro Caje, 2020
"It´s wonderful! To me is a very impressive surprise that this culture survive in USA. With your permission, I want to show how this tradition is mantained in Brazilian Northeast. In my country, I believe that this music is the meeting of the indian flutes with african drums. I would like to know more about the history of this musical expression in USA. Here I send a link to a chapter of a documentary film made about "pifes" in Brazil. The great composer and musician Hermeto Paschoal played fife in fairs, with his brothers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RvI0trPVU "

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15. adalberto aparicio, 2021
"Thanks  for posting .They sound like an entire Samba band from Brazil!!!I Feeling souful and  magical while  watching  this ,best wishes to all."

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Discussion thread #3 
African-American Fife & Drum Music: Mississippi & Jamaica

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6mRdPP6wRo&ab_channel=hultonclint

hultonclint,Feb. 1, 2009

"This is archival (?which) footage of a fife and drum group of Ed and Lonnie Young of Mississippi.  I believe it was recorded by Alan Lomax, sometime between 1959 and the early 60s.  They use a fife made of cane, and drums adapted from military bands.

It is interesting how similar it is, not just in form but also in actual content, to the fife and drum playing of "John Canoe" processional music of Jamaica.  I have put just a quick sample of that from a 1954 recording, at the end.

[My purpose for posting is to draw out this comparison, which would probably not be noticed otherwise (the clip being buried in Martin Scorcese's documentary on Blues), but if it appears to infringe someone's copyright, please contact me.]

EDIT: "This footage was shot during the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, indeed by Alan Lomax. Ed Young plays the fife; Lonnie Young, Sr., the snare; and G.D. Young, the bass drum. Lomax's audio recordings from Newport '66, including those of the Youngs, are available through the online archive of the Association for Cultural Equity (Alan Lomax Archive)." "


1. Wally Gator, 2009
"Now THAT is roots right from Africa baby. Birth of Rock."

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2. Marcio Scolmeister, 2010
"In Brazil Banda de Pífano de Caruaru    youtube.com/watch?v=pNrs3I9kkHw

youtube.com/watch?v=ekNa4lNhchM&feature=related

youtube.com/watch?v=t0Zizj24fdc&feature=related"

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3. guy br, 2011
"if you search for "Banda de Pífanos" from Brazil, you will find somenthing similar."

Great video!

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4. MissLindo Sindane, 2013
"Im from South Africa and they still make music like this"

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5. João Weimar, 2020
"If I didn’t know the source, I could say this sound was made in Brazilian northeast, this is crazy. Much respect for African heritage."

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6. Tize, 2013
"Have you ever checked out Fulani flute and drum music of Upper West Africa? It's been studied that the blues fife mimics the construction of the Fula flute. Many Fulani were brought to North America."

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7. m adera, 2019
"You can witness West Africa in this, it's funny how these people never lost their connection to Mother Earth even years later., beautiful"

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8. Serero Serera, 2020
"My people in Burkina Faso play the very same melodies and drums up to this day. I was literally in tears watching this."

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9. MrOnyxRock, 2020
"WOW!  I am clearly late to this party.  I thought this style of fife & drum music was a Caribbean thing alone.  I need to learn about this in America."

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10. YISSAYAH KONGO Reings Over Yissolele, 2020
"I see myself dancing to this African dance"

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This concludes Part II of this two part pancocojams series.

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