The Gospel Truth
Writer: Mike Gerber

Unless you're a vinyl junky, the discs you spin on your hi-fi these days are no longer black, yet in a musical sense many probably are. Because if you listen to any jazz, blues, hip-hop, soul, funk, disco, gospel, rock, what's turning you on is strongly rooted in African-American music.

African American culture has also impacted on country and folk music, klezmer, the Broadway show-song, classical composition, Latin American, African and Caribbean music. Not to mention literature, painting, architecture, interior design, the clothes we wear, the way we speak, our way of life.

What though do you mean by African-American music? Think you know? Channel 4's documentary The Gospel Truth might shake any complacent assumptions. It argues that there are strong links between Scottish Presbyterian music and the gospel music heard in Black churches.

We learn that Highland Scots were slave owners in the Southern States of America from 1740s onwards and slaves brought over from west Africa took on some of their owners' cultural and religious practices.

One thing is certain; anyone who contends that there have been important non-Black influences on African-American music can expect to take considerable flak.

Black musicians and pundits often complain, 'the whites stole our music'. Their perception is that white musicians and music business entrepreneurs that often benefited from the music that Black people originated. So the issue of the origins of African-American music is hotly political! The debate was particularly potent in the late 1950s and 1960s when African-Americans were struggling for civil rights, and proudly reclaiming their African roots.

African-American is, by definition, where everybody else fits in. All Americans are, except Native Americans, recent settlers historically speaking. They all brought their music, and much of that too affected the development of African-American music.

Other influences include the music composed by first-generation Jewish-Americans - George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Vincent Youmans, Richard Rogers and others. These songs fed right into jazz as standards on which musicians frequently based their improvisations.

Yet those wonderful songs were themselves emanations from the American 'melting pot' that Inevitably included a heavy debt to African-American influences - ragtime, cakewalk, blues, the black marching-band tradition. Those idioms in turn were melting-pot phenomena.

Some of the best research on this convolutedly complex terrain has been done by a white South African, Peter Van Der Merwe. In his book Origins of Popular Style, he notes: 'For over three and a half centuries Black and white Americans have been living, working and making music together, or at any rate within hollering distance of each other. It would be a miracle if there were not profound musical influence and such influence there undoubtedly was.'

Yes, those Gaelic speaking Highlanders are in there, but so too are Scottish-Irish and the Catholic-Irish and Latinos. So too the French-Louisianan colonials, a powerful factor in the musical development of the 'Creole' blacks.

New Orleans Creoles were relatively privileged compared with most other Black people. Their musicians were often schooled in European classical music. They however also absorbed the rhythmically and tonally thrilling strains coming from their Black culture, along with motley other musical influences. Many key figures in early jazz, like Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton and Freddie Keppard were Creoles.

The debate about the provenance of jazz shows no sign of abating, but what should be beyond dispute, is that a disproportionate number of jazz's greatest practitioners and innovators have been Black.

The blues is one musical form that is unarguably African-American. It is a commonly held misunderstanding to define blues narrowly as 'music of oppression'. Blues music was born out of African-American oppression, certainly, but it often transcends it. Particularly in the urban context - the classic jazz-blues of Bessie Smith, boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues, the belting southern soul music of Ray Charles.

Look beyond the 'oppression' definition and, as Van Der Merwe finds, 'the blues' genealogy includes clear connections to both British and African folk music, as well as the jigs, dance songs, minstrel tunes, and even parlour music'. Many characteristics commonly associated with the blues and other African-American forms are not in themselves unique to Black music. Bent or 'blue' notes, improvisation, vocalised instrumentation, melismatic singing, call-and-response, syncopation, modes, the preponderant minor-key feel - all these can be found in other musical cultures.

What makes African-American music Black? The answer must be that Americans of African descent, by degrees, synthesised, personalised and transformed their multifarious musical influences, some recalled from African cultures, some learned from other Americans. They did this in numerous, cumulative ways - examples being the far greater emphasis on syncopation, the introduction of African-style cross-rhythms and the adaptation of instrumental techniques. Out of all this they originated a succession of distinctively expressive musical idioms, so creatively liberating, so vital that they swept the world and transformed popular culture.