The black musical tradition has enriched American culture and society. In 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois stated that “by fateful chance the Negro folk song – the rhythmic cry of the slave – stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas” (Blight and Gooding, 1997, p. 186). It “remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation,” he added, “and the greatest gift of the Negro people.”

Its creators came mostly from West and Central Africa. There, prior to and during the Atlantic slave trade, music-making was customary. To wit, singers were vital in ancestor worship and ceremonies for marriage, birth, death, hunting, and the harvest. Music evinced improvisation (instrumental and vocal) and repetition. A core feature was polyphony (two or more melodic lines or parts). Instruments and voices together effected harmonic exchanges. Tribes, clans, and nations customarily sang by a method of call-and-response. After a lead singer or canter began a holler or chant, then others answered in a choral refrain. He led via varying pitches: yodels, falsettos, screams, slides, or raspy sounds. Drums (with wood, gourd, or clay bodies), clapsticks, bells, and rattles provided percussion. The common string instruments were the bow, harp, and lute, forerunner of the American banjo. Traditional wind instruments included the flute, animal horn-trumpet, and oboe.

In the face of New World slavery and oppression, Africans retained and reinvented many of their religious and musical customs. Gradually accepting Catholicism and Protestantism, but retaining elements of indigenous African religions, including Islam, slaves created Afro-Christianity. Converts modified tribal traditions of “sacrifice, drumming, singing, and [spirit] possession.” Slaves also assembled the West African “circle and [used] its counterclockwise direction” or “ring-shout” in worship services

Bondmen and women were creative vocalists. This is not surprising, given their roots in oral cultures. Their learning to read and write was strictly forbidden. Antebellum art shows slaves playing banjos and dancing; slave gatherings also had singing and storytelling. They engaged in “lining out” hymns in church service, where maybe only one was literate.