Category Archives: Uncategorized

May9

History of Gospel Music

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When the slaves arrived from Africa to the new country, they brought nothing, except for memories and their musical heritage.  In America the slave owners deliberately separated most slaves from their families and their tribe members, in order to break them down and assimilate them to the new culture.  Culture shock and language barriers also helped to increase the general confusion among the slaves.  The only thing the slaves had in common was their music.  Even though the slaves came from different parts of Africa, most African music was similar in its bases.

Being in the New World, the colonial clergymen pondered the idea of converting the so-called heathens of the New World, the blacks and the Indians, to Christianity.  Most whites put effort into civilizing and converting the slaves, and since most slaves felt emotionally divided out of the extreme culture shock, they easily absorbed the new message of the Christian religion.  Many slaves recognized themselves when they were told stories out of the Bible. Stories like Moses and the people of Israel, who lived in oppression, but were told and promised by God that they one day should be liberated, were absorbed by the Negroes.  The Christian message strongly affected the slaves and their ability to endure the hardships and trials they often were confronted with while working out on the plantation fields.  As the time passed by and the slaves got more and more integrated into the new world, they started blending their African musical heritage with their influences from the new world.  Out of the hardships and trials of slavery a rich musical culture evolved, which forever came to change the world’s music scene.  Mixing their musical heritage from Africa with the Christian religion, the English language, and the musical tradition from the Anglo-Saxon church, the slaves came to create a totally new music form as they at the same time laid the foundations for another one.

May9

Field Holler

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A field holler, also called a holler, is an extemporized form of black American song, sung by southern labourers to accompany their work. It differs from the collective work song in that it was sung solo, though early observers noted that a holler, or ‘cry’, might be echoed by other workers or passed from one to another. Though commonly associated with cotton cultivation, the field holler was also sung by levee workers, mule-skinners and field hands in rice and sugar plantations.

Field hollers are also known as corn-field hollers, water calls, and whoops. They were sung solos and normally expressed by the southern labourers (most often slaves). These songs expressed many different topics, many times cries for water and food, cries about what was happening in their daily lives, to let other people know that they were out in the fields working on that particular day, and many other cirumstances that that one would feel like singing about. Some were even about the slaves religious devotions. Field hollers were even used as an outlet for southern laubourers to sing about their troubles and hardships in their everyday lives.

It is believed that the holler is the precursor of the blues, though it may in turn have been influenced by blues recordings. No recorded examples of hollers exist from before the mid-1930s, but some blues recordings, such as Mistreatin’ Mama (1927, Black Patti) by the harmonica player Jaybird Coleman, show strong links with the field holler tradition. A white tradition of ‘hollerin’’ may be of similar age, but has not been adequately researched. Since 1969 an annual ‘hollerin’’ contest has been held in Sampson County, North Carolina.