4.17 The Evolution of African American Music: From Spirituals to Hip-Hop

Since their ancestors first arrived in the Americas, African Americans have built their music on African-based elements: improvisation, call and response, syncopation, storytelling and the fusion of music with dance. In the required essay 'The Evolution of African American Music' (1980), the ethnomusicologist Portia K. Maultsby traces how these elements carried through from spirituals to later genres.

The African American musical tradition includes spirituals (2.9), blues and jazz (3.14), gospel, rhythm and blues (R&B), soul, funk and hip-hop. It has transformed American genres like rock and roll and international ones like Latin jazz. It expresses joy, hope and creativity alongside social critique, in the middle of ongoing racism.

Rock and roll grew from Black music. Performers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer and electric guitarist, Bo Diddley and Little Richard combined gospel and the blues with new rhythms and electric instruments. The required live performance by Ruth Brown, an early R&B star of the 1950s, shows the sound that fed into rock and roll.

Hip-hop is a culture created in the 1970s by young Black and Latino people in New York City's Bronx, a neighborhood hit hard by poverty and disinvestment. It grew into a global phenomenon. Its elements:

• DJing: DJs like Kool Herc, often credited with starting hip-hop at Bronx parties in 1973, played records by artists like James Brown and extended 'the break', the instrumental part of a song, by switching between two copies of a record. DJs like Grandmaster Flash developed turntable techniques such as precise mixing and scratching.
• MCing (rapping): rhyming over the beat, which began as DJs and MCs added vocals to hype the crowd and became modern rap music.
• Breaking: dancers called b-boys and b-girls showed off new moves during the extended breaks, alone or in crews. The required 1984 photo shows breakdancers in New York.
• Graffiti: an older art form that became part of hip-hop. 'Writers' covered walls, bridges and subway cars, and the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat first became known through graffiti.

Hip-hop came of age in the wake of the Black Freedom movement and the Black Arts movement (4.10). It borrowed Black Panther and Afrocentric fashion, Black nationalist ideas, jazz and spoken poetry to express African American experiences and identities.

After the Black Power movement declined, hip-hop gave voice to ongoing political struggles and reflected on Black America's past, present and future. Artists from Queen Latifah to Kendrick Lamar have raised awareness of political issues for audiences around the world.