Africa and the Blues

With scholarly care but with an ease for the general reader this book proposes an entirely new theory on blue notes and their origins. Tracing which musical traits came from Africa and which mutations and mergers occurred in the Americas, Gerhard Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist, shows that the African American tradition we call the blues is truly a musical phenomenon belonging to the African cultural world.
In 1969 he chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between two such far-flung musical worlds is African American music, the sound that became the blues.
For forty years he has been tracing the remote genealogies of African cultural music in eighteen African nations, in Brazil and Venezuela, and in the United States. In Africa and the Blues, his comprehensive map goes full circle, for he takes the blues out of Africa and then back to their African cradle, where he discovers that American mutations have gone home to entith contemporary African sound.
Kubik’s narrative is the amazing genealogical history of this music that now pervades the globe.
Gerhard Kubik is a professor at the University of Mainz, Germany. He is a permanent member of the Center for Black Music Research and is an honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.