Practice: Musical and Cultural Production

• Hip Hop-originated in the 1970s in the Bronx, with four distinct elements: dj, rap, breakdancing, and graffiti.

• Focuses on the mind-body connection

• Spirituals-originated in slavery-religious songs were brought from Africa by speech, not writing

• ”During the Civil War the ‘Negro Spiritual’ emerged as a clearly recognizable cultural form; it was then grasped as a distinct, observable, and knowable element of black culture” (Cruz 1999)

• Nothing was written until the Civil War

• Both originate from Afro-diasporic traditions

Historical and Cultural basis for Practice

• Hip Hop affects multiple senses-graffiti (visual) breakdancing (touch/physical), rap/dj (hearing)

• Spirituals mostly affects hearing, but different feelings emerge, due to the religious element of spirituals

• Both types of music initiate the feeling of ‘home’ due to diasporic themes and elements

Music and Cultural Production in relation to Culture, Identity, Power and Freedom

• Hip-Hop

"Identity in hip hop is deeply rooted in the specific, the local experience, and one's attachment to and statues in a local group or alternative family.” (Rose 1994)

"Hip hop emerges from complex cultural exchanges and larger social and political conditions of disillusionment and alienation." (Rose 1994)

Spirituals

"Religious singing also enables slaves to express their despair over their statues a chattel.” (Cruz 1999)

"It is a well established fact that music was one of the primary means by which slaves cultivated collective knowledge and solidarity.” (Cruz 1999)

Cuba and Nigeria's Relationship

The movement of the Yoruba religious music between Nigeria and Cuba contributed to the African diaspora. The Yoruba is an ethnic group of people from southwest Nigeria. Music is highly important within the religion, with drums and drumming as the most significant. The different sounds the drums produce is seen as its own language. The Bata drums are believed to be the oldest Yoruba drum, which also communicates with the deities."The spiritual power of the instrument is often illustrated by narrations of how it was used by ancient Yoruba warriors. Bata drumming, it was believed, had the power to energize warriors in battle" (Omojola 2012). In present day, the Bata is only used for sacred and ritual events, and typically only men have the honour to play the Bata since it is believed the have the physical strength and spiritual power to play the drum. The bata drum was restricted to just men to play in Cuba since its religious significance in the Yoruba and different laws in Cuba. 

"In Nigeria, unlike in Cuba, no strict prohibition against women playing the bàtá exists, and this newly acquired transatlantic knowledge has, in turn, potentiated enormous gendered break within the landscape of ritual music in Cuba" (Meadows 2021).

Below is a video of Bata drumming, "Galí, Regla & Nagybe Santiago" "

• 1990s-allowed for more cultural exchange and visits by Nigerian priests, the internet, 

• Africant traditionalist babalowo (priest/scholar) Enrique Orozco Rubio-reversing gender norms, teaches Ifa academically  

• "In line with other African traditionalists, Orozco Rubio established ties with the Yorùbá traditional religion abroad through contact with Cuba’s diasporas in Venezuela and other locations in the Americas; the visits of Nigerian babaláwos to the island; and even through limited—and often illegal—internet access and communication" (Meadows 2021). 

• Anthropologist Stephen Palmie coined the term 'ethnographic interface' at center of afro-cuban religion  

"Since 2013, Orozco Rubio’s academic research has focused specifically on what he frames as the “emancipation of women” in Cuban Ifá-òrìṣà and includes a thesis and academic conference presentations on gender, Ifá, and òrìṣà worship in contemporary Nigeria" (Meadows 2021). 

• Women emancipation is only focused on the heteronormative women, which includes being a good wife and mother.

• Nagybe Madariaga Pouymiró- female cuban percussionist, was prohibited to play the bata drums, received secret lessons and spent over 6 years learning how to play and sing ritual music while facing intimidation (video of her playing the Bata above)

• "Pouymiró continued playing, however, and following one of her public performances on the batá she was assaulted, physically beaten, and hospitalized, an event she directly attributes to her continued batá playing in the face of male intimidation and scorn. Undeterred, she continued playing batá publicly." (Meadows 2021) 

• "Orozco Rubio agreed that female access to the consecrated batá would be permitted within African traditionalism, having learned through contact with African traditionalist babaláwos in the Americas, visiting Nigerian babaláwos, and videos of contemporary sacred drumming in Yorùbáland that although female sacred percussionists were rare, there was no theological impediment or prohibition to their playing" (Meadows 2021).

• Below is the video "Obini Batá 2" "

• "Notably, the first instance of women playing consecrated batá would not be a tambor, or ritual event, at all; rather, it would constitute an initial instance of access to the consecrated drums outside of the context of ritual by Pouymiró, Caridad Rubio, and Anais López Rubio with the intent of enabling the women to officiate ceremonies using the batá at a later date" (Meadows 2021). Orozco did not come or oversee event, and the event was not for a ritual 

• "it is worth noting the selective Yorùbácentrism that Pouymiró and the other women involved exhibit in their approach to Nigerian-style ritual music in Cuba" (Meadows 2021).

• "The maneuvering of ownership and control over the details of the event by Orozco Rubio in this case demonstrates the ways in which male control over events rooted in lifelong female struggles for religious egalitarianism renaturalize the hierarchies of male-controlled knowledge and access, even within an ostensibly more open and “emancipatory” Nigerian-style Ifá" (Meadows 2021).

In contrast, Uncle Gus Clark described: 

“My boss didn’ ‘low us to go to church, er to pray or sing. Iffen he ketched us prayin’ er singin’ he whupped us. He better not ketch you with a book in yo’ han’. Didn’ ‘low it,” (Federal Writers’ Project, 1938, 24).

Here, the act of singing was associated with literacy, which was overwhelmingly criminalized throughout spaces of enslavement. In this way, the criminalization of certain behaviours was somewhat fluid: enforced depending on social environment and geographical location. Across state lines, through spaces of enslavement, some conditions remained constant through all slave codes: that enslavement was a permanent condition, inherited through the matrilineal line; that enslaved persons were considered to be property, similar to real estate; that slave marriages were not legally enforceable; and the restriction of movement of both enslaved and free Black people (Library of Congress). These universally criminalized conditions, mainly the ability to exist as an enfranchised person, to engage in freely chosen romantic and sexual relations, and to move freely, were challenged within musical engagement through time and space.

Spirituals, Work Songs, and Field Holler

The earliest recorded music produced by persons of African descent in the United States were slave songs, including spirituals, work songs and field holler. 

When theorizing Black geographies, McKittrick calls to the ways that enslaved Black peoples used alternate or fugitive mapping practices to escape spaces of enslavement:

“The conditions of bondage did not foreclose black geographies but rather incited alternative mapping practices during and after transatlantic slavery, many of which were/are produced outside the official tenets of cartography: fugitive and maroon maps, literacy maps, food-nourishment maps, family maps, music maps were assembled alongside ‘real’ maps,” (McKittrick, 2011, 949).

Rather than just be sung as a form of entertainment or escapism, the folk spiritual archives a history of African American enslavement as charted out in the plans for freedom they contain.

Concerning improvisation, Williams comments:

"There is no separation between how an African American musician creates and how he or she ontologically expresses what it means to be Black in the world. The life and politics of African American improvisational culture are reflected in how improvising musicians create their own Black music space in which to articulate their humanity," (Williams, 2021, 4).

The blues directly emerged from the violent and racist conditions of post-emancipation living. The blues themselves act as a medium onto which the singer can throw out their “blues” and lament on the hardships, suffering, and pain of their lives. In the context of the delta blues, this hardship and the content of the lyrics were directly tied to the conditions of the deep south:

“Songs by these artists often equate the value or necessity of such character traits [ruggedness/independance] with the demands of the physical environment, the hardship and brutality of life in the Deep South of the USA being a continual point of reference in song lyrics (Bennett, 2017, 7).

One condition of emancipation, however, that was realized through the emergence of the blues was the ability to meaningfully travel through space. Although this ability was still restricted in certain ways (i.e. KKK violence, local legislations), Black people and communities were now able to unprecedentedly roam freely. Rural blues musicians were traveling musicians: performing individually, self-accompanied by portable instruments. In this way, the blues marked an era in which the relationship between Black communities and open space radically shifted.

Woods clarifies that:

"The blues and spirituals are not simply mechanistic responses to oppression. They are the conscious recodification of African and African American knowledge systems, soundscapes, spirituality, and social research traditions," (Woods, 2007, 59-60).

Thus, the blues also acted as a medium onto which traditional knowledge and moral systems were "recodified" post-emancipation. In this sense, music in the Black American context has always acted as a space where tradition is both safeguarded through the medium of song, but also is transformed to fit within the spatial and temporal contexts of where these traditional knowledges are applied.

The classic blues were represented by Black women who unabashedly wrote about the intimate details of their lives. Blues lyrics committed to presenting accurate and truthful accounts of the everyday – often with an emphasis on mistreatment by male partners (Maultsby “Vaudeville Blues”). Lyrics focused on the individual experiences of the speaker – a large shift from the subject matter of spirituals, work songs, and field holler. While lived experiences were commonly the subject of slave music, these experiences and desires were expressed in collective terms: 

“[S]lave music – both religious and secular – was quintessentially collective music. It was collectively performed and it gave expression to the community’s yearning for freedom. The blues, on the other hand, the predominant postslavery African-American musical form, articulated a new valuation of individual emotional needs and desires,” (Davis, 1999, 31).

During the period of enslavement, the religious and the secular were often intertwined: the spirituals were used in non-religious contexts, and work songs were often touched by the religious. There were no designated spaces for the religious and the secular. Post-emanciaption, however, the realm of religion slowly settled within the space of the church, creating a binary of religious/secular (32). This dichotomy manifested within music as well: where folk music, like work songs and field holler evolved into the blues, the spirituals morphed into gospel music, which was almost exclusively practiced in the church. 

“As [the blues] came to displace sacred music in the everyday lives of black people, it both reflected and helped to construct a new black conciousness. This consciousness interpreted God as the opposite of the Devil, religion as the not-secular, and the secular as largely sexual. With the blues came the designations “God’s music” and “the Devil’s music,” (33)

Although these two kinds of music were positioned as opposites, Angela Davis points out the importance of recognizing their shared history, and their roots continued to influence their contemporary production. Many classical blues singers, for example, were raised in the gospel tradition and then moved towards the blues. When describing the musical performance artist of Bessie Smith, Danny Barker notes the convergence of forms:

“The most astonishing aspect of the blues is that, replete with a sense of defeat and downheartedness, they are not intrinsically pessimistic; their burden of woe and melancholy is dialectically redeemed through sheer force of sensuality, into an almost exultant affirmation of life, of love, of sex, of movement, of hope,” (Wright, 1960, xxi).

Maultsby comments:

Just as the rural blues were intrinsically linked to rural space and the lived experiences and hardships that accompanied the lives of Black folks living in the deep south, vaudeville blues were fundamentally tethered to the urban space of the performance hall. The ability for blues singers to sing truthfully and openly about sex and sexuality was attributed to the open-mindedness of the urban space where they were forwarding their music. In this sense, the geographic space of the urban created the conditions where classic or vaudeville blues could be fully realized.

Williams asserts that improvisation through music acts as a practice of placemaking, of producing, mapping, and theorizing time and space as they are connected to discursive and material modes of violence. Williams explains,

"African American improvisation is understood here as a musical practice rooted in critiquing the social systems that have marginalized musicians and their communities. But it is also understood as a practice of producing space that reflects the radical imagination for a better future," (Williams, 2021, 6)

The act of improvisation is fundamental to Black American modes of musical production. From slave music to the blues, to jazz, to R&B, to hip hop, improvisation within music remains constant within the Black musical tradition. According to Williams, the act of improvisation acts as a simultaneous critique of power structures that engender the disenfranchisement and oppression of Black persons and communities and also a space of emergence where sustainable and just futures can be imagined and built. “Black musical placemaking,” as practiced through the mode of improvisation, William explains, “is not about ownership, but about freedom,” (Williams, 2021, 13). 

Improvisation is a form of production: when an artist is improvising, they are creating in real-time. They are negotiating sound, phrasing, and lyric. The act of improvisation carves out a liminal space where freedoms and futures are expressed and built through the language of music.

When thinking about the digital archive, Neal expresses that:

“The crisis and challenge of the Black archive not only poses questions of knowledge, but of the way that knowledge moves or manifests within the Black archive that are obscure, ephemeral, fugitive, precarious, fluid, and increasingly digital – qualities that challenge the very idea of what constitutes an archive,” (Neal, 2022, 4).

The very act of documenting Black presence through the diaspora, of forwarding different and unconventional modes of theorizing, researching, or documenting is emergent. It is through imagining different forms of archiving, documenting, and curating knowledge, and putting these imaginations into practice, that the “crisis and challenge of the Black archive” can be wholly considered and contended with.

Limitations of the Archive

There were unfortunately many research limitations when looking for primary source documents. For example, the original “Come Down Moses” sheet music, appears to be lost, along with many primary sources, potentially intentionally made absent. When looking into hip hop, it was a bit easier since the emergence of it has been more recent, but still had many limitations. For example, on the right, is a picture of DJ Bill Hawkins, who was Cleveland’s first African American DJ, and there are no recordings or audio of his work, only a few pictures in the NMAAHC.

”It is important to distinguish the makers of songs from the users of songs. Makers are of course users, but not all users are makers. Nonetheless, in the larger historical context in which social production of musical practices took place, it is not possible to reduce‘black’ music to black producers and white consumers. Consider a slave who is forced to sing: Who is producing music?”(Cruz 1999)

Patrolling and Controlling the Absence

One can choose to make the present absent when it comes to music, because the musician produced it full of presence, but the listener now has the power to choose what is present and absent in the song. Since Spirituals were brought and passed down through oral translation, much of its original meaning is absent. The commodification of hip hop has lead to the production of absence within the music. To combat these experiences of absence, we can turn to affect theory, as music enacts feelings of home, identity, and the connection to the diaspora in our body.

The Diaspora between Nigeria, Cuba, and the United States 

The Yoruba religion moved from Nigeria, to Cuba, and finally to the United States, and with those movements, the religion evolved and changed, as we can see above with the differences of the religious music in Cuba -Mules and Men (1935) by Zora Neale Huston describes African American folktales and hoodoo that were influenced by the Yoruba religion and African tales from the past and part of the diaspora -"While there are other African as well as Native American and European sources for other examples of African American orature, the folktales from Mules and Men that I analyze below have clear antecedents in Yoruba ese Ifa." (Washington 2012)

 "Both the African American and Yoruba works center on creative control and feature entities of dubious repute." (Washington 2012) 

Carl Van Vechten, "Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston," April 3, 1938. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, Washington, D.C.

Below is an excerpt from Mules and Men that describe the hoodoo or ‘“Ritual to get a man” 

Asaphs of Seraph: Yoruba Christian Organization based in the United States, hold an annual convention every year 

The group of Yoruba men and women living in the United States who belong to the Asaphs of Seraph are characteristic of a 'new' African diaspora that has recently received attention from scholars" (Brennan 2012)

 "Music serves both centripetal and centrifugal roles, allowing both reproduction and creativity in the production of diasporic identities and communities" (Brennan 2012) 

"Music is not only central to the practices of evangelism that animate the community, but it is also the 'essence' of their identity, no matter where they are located" (Brennan 2012) 

• Music is key in strengthening the connection to God and the religion, and everyone wears white, which represents the connection to heaven and God

• Convention ends with Unity Dance, where all participants sing and dance. The convention is over July 4th weekend, and started in 1998. The spiritual connection through song and dance is the most important factor in the convention. 

• Convention allows for Nigerian-Americans in general to feel connection and the sense of home with traditional Yourba singing-diaspora 

"Musical performances at the annual conventions are a way of producing a transnational community of Yoruba Christians, of keeping migrants connected to Cherubim and Seraphim church communities back home in Nigeria, and most importantly, of producing a form of intersubjectivity through the performative act of singing together" (Brennan 2012) 

"Music is thus a cultural practice of diaspora with distinctive embodied, sensory, linguistic, and commodified mediations and circulations" (Brennan 2012)