In West Africa, an individual's relationship to the various gods and spirits was central to one's life. Like the American Indian, this belief was the foundation on which their whole culture was based. Music was one of the main connections between men and their gods and was the West African's constant companion. Religion was a central force in a person's life, and music and dance were basic ways of worshipping.

Slavery:

In the late summer of 1619, a Dutch ship landed at the English settlement in Virginia and sold into slavery twenty black Africans. In the coming years, hundreds of thousands followed these first confused, frightened people into enslavement in America, and millions more of their descendants were born into slavery.

The north was too cold and hilly to grow the kinds of crops that made a slave-based economy profitable, and slavery soon died out there. But plantation crops were the heart of the South's economy until the Civil War, and plantations depended on slavery.

On practically all the plantations, African languages and religious practices were forbidden because the white masters regarded these as superstitious nonsense. Tribes were deliberately broken up and families were torn apart. On some plantations slaves were bred like animals. Slaves were prohibited from meeting without white supervision and were forced to work all day, generally six days a week, at exhausting, monotonous labor.

All most of the slaves could realistically do was hope for freedom some day. In the meantime, they tried to make the best of their situation by holding on to as much of their integrity and self-respect as they could. Their music was one of the most important ways they had to keep from being completely beaten down.

At first, the slaves probably sang some of the same songs they brought from Africa. Later on, they made up new songs telling of the work they were doing in America and how they felt about it. The words to these songs were mostly English; the leader-chorus form and many of the melodies were probably African.

The style and structure of the slaves' music show how they adjusted to the white's culture by keeping what they could, giving up what they had to, and adapting what they found around them. The way the slaves felt about their lives echoes in the words and melodies of their songs, and in the way they were performed. In all of the songs, the desire for freedom, whether through death or escape, revolt, or some other end to enslavement comes across loud and clear.

Freedom:

By the time the Civil war ended, there were four million blacks that were no longer slaves. Blacks and whites began to have much more to do with one another, and their music mixed even more freely, for music is seldom bound by racial boundaries.

The minstrel show and the spread of the railroad gave whites and blacks a good dose of the other's music. Black people began to make up songs that reflected both their increasing contact with white folk, popular music and their changed status in America.

Black American folk ballads were generated after the Civil War when blacks had more chances to pick up the form from whites and more time to sing. In this tradition, ballad narrators were usually observers and fairly dispassionate storytellers. But while black people were creating ballads like "John Henry" and "The Ballad of the Boll Weevil," they were also developing a new form of song in which the narrator played the main role. That form was the blues.