Did African American Culture Influence The Trans-Atlantic Slave Culture

The music of Blues arise from a black cultural melting pot in the American South of the 1890s. By the 1910s, the first recorded blues were published as sheet music, the blues had taken the form widely recognized today. The music of blues was originated in the 19th Century on Southern plantations. The first African slaves are brought to the American colony from Virginia in 1619. They’ve been forced to work as croppers and builders. The Congress drafted ended on 1 January 1808. Over nearly two centuries, the continuous entry of Africans into the American South created a dynamic trans-atlantic slave culture that would generate a uniquely rich musical tradition and an impossible tangle of influence and innovation that would humiliate

In several cases, slave ship captains forced the slaves sing and dance on board, because he beleived that the exercise might help to keep the slaves healthy during the harsh trans-Atlantic voyage known as the Middle Passage. What reports exist suggest that the slaves at times sang mourns of their exile. To express the least that it must have been an odd scene and the foul, crowded ship like a floating slum, densely packed with brutalized black captives compelled to sing by whip-bearing white slave traders. The music would have been strange to the whites, and surely would have meant something entirely different to each of the two groups. That strange duality of music between whites and blacks would persist in the slave experience and be notable in the evolution of the blues as a music filled with double meaning

Some owners think that it might provide a diversion for the slave and thereby keeping them happy and thus, less likely to rebel or runaway and for the master and mistress by encourage the slaves to dance and make music. Other owners took a less benign view of black music on their plantations. Songs, they realized, could spread information, and lyrical content, whether in an African dialect or simply in the doubled meanings that became the stock in trade of the blues, was an area of slave culture that existed outside of owners' control. Where it could, then, black music flourished. On the mid-nineteenth century, African Americans had developed a rich variety of work songs, folk songs, and spirituals both of the latter borrowing from white European sources that they accompanied on instruments like the fiddle, banjo, flute, bones, and