Un article intéressant sur l’influence non seulement africaine, mais africaine ET musulmane, sur l’origine des musiques africaines-américaines, et en particulier le blues :
What Islam Gave the Blues
Sylviane A. Diouf, Renovatio, le 17 juin 2019
▻https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/what-islam-gave-the-blues
The melancholy song may have been the musical recitation of the Qur’an or a Sufi chant: the young man calling on his faith’s oral expression to assuage his despair. On American farms and plantations, Qur’anic recitations and Sufi chants, done solo or in small groups, would have sounded just like songs. And so too would the call to prayer, the adhan. The words of the adhan are the same everywhere, but each call has a distinctive sound, characteristic of each place. It will sound different in, say, Uzbekistan and Senegal. Perhaps the most striking holler in that regard came from Bama, the star singer of Parchman prison. Like the adhan, his “Levee Camp Holler,” recorded by Lomax as late as 1947—a sign of the genre’s longevity—could have floated from a minaret. It is almost an exact match to the call to prayer by a West African muezzin. It features the same ornamented notes, elongated syllables sung with wavy intonations, melismas, and pauses. When both pieces are juxtaposed, it is hard to distinguish when the call to prayer ends and the holler starts. It was most likely these audible expressions of Muslim faith, and not merely what the musicians brought over, that generated the distinctive African American music of the South.
#Musique #Musique_et_politique #Histoire #Blues #Afrique #Islam #USA
