This means that long before bebop and hip-hop, 19th century
black folk spewed audacious new melodies over vintage chord
changes. Long before hip-hop and sampling technology, they
blasphemously and radically grafted snatches of familiar pop
ditties all over their most fervent messages to God. James
Brown may have propagated the cult of the breakbeat, but as
a cultural practice, the musical gambit of sonic gumbo stew
precedes him by centuries.
From Eileen Southern’s epic study The Music of Black Americans
we also learn that Public Performance of Negritude is the
way Black Consciousness emerges in America to articulate and
escalate the social status of the enslaved, and also to announce
nascent notions of a Black juke-joint supremacy — a supremacy
built on doing the knowledge with sound. Southern tells of
a visitor to a Virginia plantation in 1784, who observed with
amazement that after a day of hard labor, an enslaved African
walked to a dance where he would perform with “astonishing
ability and the most vigorous exertions, keeping time and
cadence most exactly with the music…until he exhausts
himself ’’. At times, the visitor noted, the enslaved willfully
drove their presumptive masters from the dancefloor with
competitive gusto. “Masters and slaves had become more and
more intoxicated with the spirit of the dancing, they played
faster and ‘wilder’ until the whites could keep up no longer
and withdrew from the dancing. This was exactly what the
slave dancers