The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #79469   Message #2536033
Posted By: TinDor
09-Jan-09 - 10:40 AM
Thread Name: Gospel music is Gaelic? UK TV 21 Mar
Subject: RE: Gospel music is Gaelic? UK TV 21 Mar
Gospel - The Early Beginnings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DklnNHLoORk&feature=related

^^ Various clips from a docu on Black Gospel music above. Listen to/from 3:53-5:10 to see the difference between European "Lining Out" and what is described as "African raising the hymn".

Blind Will posted:

"The ultimate test to my musical theory would be hearing the black American version of lining out and in all my internet search for soundclips I have only found one single sample.And that sample sounded very little like the blues, though it did share some of the same strucure as other types of lining out.This put doubts in my mind about my idea of a blues/lining out connection, though there might be other examples of black lining out that come closer to the bluesy style"

Here goes a great comparison..

Scottish roots in AfroAmerican music?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQJeM1X8lDw&

^^A comparsion of Gaelic/Watts "Lining Out" vs AfroAmerican doing the same style of "Lining Out"

as you can see in the nest example, that Watts lining out style doesn't sound anything like the West/Central AFrican derived call and response style in AfroAmerican spirutauls below..

Difference between Call & Response (African style) and Lining Out (gaelic-watts)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si9H1D1xhNI&feature=related

On the Blues style, it's almost pseudo Arabised Islamic in sound. Not too similar to the Gaelic sound at all

Muslim roots in AfroAmerican music?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns8ZsAFWiVk&feature=related

""Levee Camp Holler" is no ordinary song. It's the product of ex-slaves who worked moving earth all day in post-Civil War America. It has lyrics that, like the call to prayer, speak about a glorious God. But it's the song's melody and note changes that closely resemble one of Islam's best-known refrains. Like the call to prayer, "Levee Camp Holler" emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter's vocal chords. Dramatic changes in musical scales punctuate both "Levee Camp Holler" and the adhan. A nasal intonation is evident in both.

Upward of 30 percent of the African slaves in the United States were Muslim, and an untold number of them spoke and wrote Arabic, historians say now.

Coincidence or not, this traditional AfroAmerican folk music possesses features that are found in Islamic African music and hardly at all in other styles.

Grehart Kubik, a musicologist who specializes in African rain-forest music, concludes: "Many traits that have been considered unusual, strange and difficult to interpret by earlier blues researchers can now be better understood as a thoroughly processed and transformed Arabic-Islamic stylistic component. What makes the blues different from African American music in the Caribbean and in South America is, after all, its Arabic-Islamic stylistic ingredients."