HETEROPHONY.
Intrinsic to Africa-based music, but not other musics which focus on harmony. I've been wanting to start a thread about that-- thanks, Jerry.

Doo Wop has influneces from some of the music streams that flowed over to the US from Africa when many of its enslaved people were forced to come here, but it also has influence from other strains of other sources, where harmony is the prized object.

Heterophony was the natural form of shared-singing expression for the spirituals as they were originated. As these were marketed to European-heritage Americans, though, harmony was added to them. Some of that tendency to use harmony came, consciously or unconsciously, from white hymnody on and around the plantations as well as via church and campmeeting influences.

There is STILL a confusion that harmony is a "higher" form of musicianship, and an effort to "raise" the assessment of black musicianship by pointing to educated black composers.... I think, myself, that heterophony is actually the higher and more beautiful form and doesn't NEED to be raised.

Heterophony can still be heard today in singalongs if the people singing are not aiming for harmony but are singing along as individuals using whatever each one thinks "the" tune is supposed to be. I think-- I would have to go back and listen to some sound files I have not heard since learning about heterophony-- that maybe Ladysmith Black Mambazo are singing much of the time in heterophony.

You always have to remember that in black gospel, MOST of the arrangements we think of as "harmony" are, equally, "heterophony." And that in black gospel, arrangements were just as likely to be worked out by ear as to be written out. Again, there is still an effort to raise that up, as if composition on paper is better than creative improvisation.

Somewhere in my sound files I have a clip of an early quartet rehearsal where you can HEAR the guys work out an arrangement, and practice it, and get into an argument over how it "should" go.

People.... are PEOPLE. :~)

~S~