Customer Reviews

Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: BLACK FOLK MUSIC TO THE CIVIL WAR (Music in American Life)

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Epstein expertly culls available documentary evidence, including contemporary accounts as well as such sources as runaway slave notices mentioning that the slave in question was a fiddler, to fill in a lot of gaps in our knowledge of how African music developed when it was transplanted to North America. The book is well-written and full of groundbreaking research. It's absolutely essential if you are interested in this subject.

Dena Epstein was a Chicago Librarian. She wasn't a paid musicologist, but she was determined to find out the story of African American music from the time we got off the slave ships until the Civil War. She emerged with a triumph.

No one who has not read this book really knows anything about African American, or for that matter American culture and music, worth knowing. Rather than the abstract dwelling on Africanism in this or that part of Black culture, she refutes the idea that the slaves were robbed of their culture she shows how the musical culture of West Africa was carried here and how it was modified and added to.

One of the most interesting aspects of Epstein's book for me is the record of the many different African instruments that were brought to the New World or were remade by Africans in the New World. The common idea that African instruments were limited to drums is refuted here strongly with her references to descriptions of different instruments found in the US and the West Indies. Along the way, Epstein was one of the first to reassert the AFricanness of the banjo and document it.

One interesting question which with the easiness of hindsight and futher research I raise is the issue of fiddling. Epstein documents that contrary to the popular stereotype that AFricans in the America were primarily banjoists or drummers, in the US until the point in the 19th Century when banjos became generally available and popular among most black and poor folks, African American musicians were most closely indentified with the fiddle. This is true not only in the US but in the West Indies.

Epstein does document how quickly after being "imported" African born musicians became excellent players of the fiddle, makers of fiddles, and even teachers of fiddling. She points out that the fiddle was so essential to the lives of planation African Americans that the question of whether the slave master should provide his slaves with a full time fiddler for slave dances was debated in circles who discussed how to manage slaves.

The question is really posed that such quick mastery of a very difficult instrument, and the rather rapid way it was used to play African based music could not be just a coincidence or a product of some kind of general African musical ability, but the product of retention of traditions that come from West African bowed instruments. Blacks who were fiddlers already in AFrica on African fiddle like instruments were enslaved, and their rapid progress another feature of transmission of AFrican culture into this country.

Of course, I am looking back from advances pioneered by Epstein and those who followed her.

Read this books and celebrate that triumph and learn what must be known about Black music and American culture.

I'm a vocalist and vocal music teacher and looked around for a while for an informative, yet not boring book for me to read and use as a reference guide for some of my classes. This book is all that I'd been looking for. In fact, it's the best book that I been able to find about the history of black american folk music. It's also not an easy book to find. I've been so impressed by the books that Amazon carries.