The Origins of the Blues

Initially a mere trickle, the flow of slave labor from Africa to America increased so rapidly that the number of slaves in America numbered over 750,000 by the end of the 1790s. This enormous dislocation resulted in the transfer of many African customs and traditions to the new world. Because of the nature of the slave system, however, many of these African traditions underwent dramatic transformation, taking into account the new, mostly brutal experiences of slavery to create a distinct culture in America. This unique African-American culture shared an important legacy with its West African ancestor: the importance of music in nearly all aspects of life.

Slavery in America reached its apex following the cotton revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but by this time the importation of new slaves from Africa had come to an end. This is due to the demographic buoyancy of American slavery. The American slave population wasn't stagnant but grew quickly, a fact that made it unique among Western hemisphere slave states such as Haiti, where slave mortality was much higher.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, America had lost its need for importing African slaves because the local slave population was sufficient to meet the needs of the slave-holding regions. The reasons for this are extremely complex, but one historian has summed this up by stating that: "it seems likely that the nature of US slave work by the early nineteenth century, that is cotton, and the physical habitat in which it thrived, were less arduous and less disruptive both socially and physically than work on a plantation or a mine." The vast majority of Africans enslaved in America came from the West Central African coast region. It is from descendants of these slaves, and the accumulated experience of two centuries of servitude, that the music of the blues arose.

previous | next

| Home | History | Culture | Archives | Guides | Search |


National Center for Supercomputing Applications