The Roots of Jazz: A Journey from African Rhythms to New Orleans

As I delved into the history of jazz, I discovered that this music was more than just a genre – it was an intersection where cultures, lives, and destinies converged. Imagining the circular dance moves of slaves gathered at Congo Square marked the beginning of my journey, which wound its way through the dark pathways of blues to the syncopated brightness of ragtime. Jazz's "prehistoria," or pre-history, lies hidden in the collective memory of people who carried their African roots across to the New World.

The Transfer of Africans to America

In 19th-century New Orleans... An elderly black man sits atop a large cylindrical drum, creating a rhythmic vibration with swift, sharp strikes using his fingers and the edge of his hand. A second drummer joins him with a similar staccato attack. A third man plays a stringed instrument with a body made from a gourd, while another woman beats a transformed gourd drum with two short sticks. First one sound, then others join in. The accompanying dance appears informal and spontaneous at times, yet ritualized and precise at others. A dense crowd forms circular groups – perhaps five hundred or six hundred people move to the music's vibrations, some swaying gently, others striking their feet aggressively.

This scene could have been set in Africa. However, this is nineteenth-century New Orleans, known as Congo Square. Today, there's Louis Armstrong Park on that same land. These dance performances showcasing the time and place of African rituals transferred to American soil are among the most fascinating documents in the history of African-American music. Architect Benjamin Latrobe witnessed one of these collective dances on February 21, 1819, and left us not only a firsthand written account but also sketches of several instruments used by the musicians at Congo Square. These drawings confirm that the percussion and stringed instruments played by the musicians in Congo Square around 1819 were almost identical to those used in native African music.

These dances were a crossroads at which opposites collided. The West's deep-rooted distinction between musician and audience had been erased—a distinction so fundamental for us, yet of little importance in traditional African cultures. The Western thinkers' notion of music as something to be passively contemplated had no meaning here.

The Ring Shout, also known as a "ring shout," is a rotating ritual ceremony that has been documented under various guises by ethnographers across different regions of Africa. As scholar Sterling Stuckey notes, this ritual served as a common bond among Africans to identify shared values. Its appearance in New Orleans is just one of many documented examples from the New World.

The Congo Square dances may have long since vanished, but the ring shout tradition in New Orleans continued to live on, transforming into new ritual forms. As musicologist Samuel Floyd has put it, the circle "flattened itself out to become the Second Line of jazz funeral processions"—a tradition still alive today in the streets of New Orleans.

Characteristics of African Music

The rhythmic richness of African music defines its essence. This is where we uncover the core of Africa's musical heritage and the key to its immense influence on numerous contemporary music schools. The first Western scholars who sought to understand this rhythmic vitality struggled to find a vocabulary and notation method to describe it.

Music critic Henry Edward Krehbiel describes African musicians he encountered at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago as follows: "The players showed me the most extraordinary rhythmic feeling and skill. Even Berlioz, in his finest efforts with drums, could not produce anything comparable to the artistic interest of those savages' harmonious drumming. The basic effect was a two- and three-time combination held by previous singers and subsequent drummers, but the drummers' change of rhythm, both their syncopation, and the richness achieved through dynamic devices made it impossible to convey the idea."

In traditional African communities, almost every object in daily life could be a source of rhythm, a percussion instrument, and an inspiration for dance. The tools and equipment that Africans often used to subdue their hostile environment may also be the earliest sources of instrumental music on our planet. Perhaps we uncover the hidden truth behind the double meaning of the term here – "instrument," which can refer both to a mechanism for altering the natural world and a device for creating sound.

The most distinctive feature of African music is its exceptionally rich rhythmic content. It's here that we uncover the essence of Africa's musical heritage and the secret to its influence on just as many contemporary music genres.

The Two Faces of the Blues: Country Blues and Classic Blues

Blues music was as important as jazz—and as an early precursor to jazz, perhaps even more influential. In its earliest days, unlike jazz (which emerged in New Orleans and flourished in other big cities), the blues found its most fertile ground in rural areas and the poorest regions of the country.

The blues formula known as the twelve-bar structure, typically based on three chords – tonic, dominant, and subdominant – would eventually serve as the foundation for countless jazz and popular songs, and would also gain a second life as a widely used template for 1950s rock and roll and R&B music.

When a song is sung, as was often the case in its earliest variants, blues also employs a specific stanzaic form for its lyrics: an introductory line is specified, repeated, and then continues with a rhyming couplet.

The most distinctive blues component is found in the characteristic melodic lines known as "blue notes"—typically defined as the use of both major and minor thirds in the vocal line, along with the flatted seventh. The flatted fifth was added later, but in time it too became a standard part of the blues vocabulary.

Country Blues: Robert Johnson and Charley Patton

Traditional blues style typically relies solely on a guitar accompaniment to a vocal line. W.C. Handy was inspired by just such a performance when he heard a disheveled musician playing a guitar with a knife at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi Delta around 1903. However, this minimalist performance style, often referred to as "country blues," took time to gain traction in recorded music. It wasn't until Blind Lemon Jefferson's commercial success that it showed its strength in the music market by the late 1920s.

During Paramount's pursuit of another hit, the two legendary Mississippi blues musicians, Charley Patton and Son House, were brought to the recording studios in Grafton, Wisconsin. Charley Patton's powerful vocals and free-flowing guitar work captured the raw energy of the Delta tradition, but this was often combined with a slick display showing how easily dark and introspective music could be lured into commercial entertainment traps. Before Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Patton would play his guitar behind his back or between his legs, turning it over or slapping it like a drum.

The blues mythology reached its peak in the figure of Robert Johnson as a salvation and damnation music. Even people who know very little about the blues have likely heard the story of Johnson's soul being sold to the devil at a crossroads for supernatural guitar-playing abilities. In recent years, blues scholars such as Elijah Wald, Barry Lee Pearson, and Bill McCulloch have attempted to neutralize this myth by viewing it as an overzealous fan's embarrassing mythologization. However, we cannot blame Johnson himself for the spread of this oft-told tale. Some of his most well-known recordings, such as "Hellhound on My Trail," "Cross Road Blues," or "Me and the Devil Blues," actually fueled the attention-grabbing rumor.

There can be no debate about the power of Robert Johnson's music, which was documented in two sessions in 1936 and 1937. More than any other artist, Johnson encoded a consistent musical vision that could be absorbed and adapted by the broader currents of American popular song, encompassing various tensions within the blues guitar tradition. Johnson had listened to a wide range of recordings from artists from other parts of the country, including many that would later be emulated by subsequent generations, and he mastered a series of techniques that he skillfully learned.

The story of Johnson ended tragically. On August 16, 1938, at the age of twenty-seven, he was poisoned by his jealous husband.

Classic Blues: Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith

The songs of major female blues singers in the 1920s and 1930s would find commercial success before Blind Lemon Jefferson or Charley Patton made their first recordings by a few years. While country blues singers would enjoy more freedom in their time signatures, classic blues vocalists would rigidly follow the twelve-bar form. A delta blues artist would rely on guitar accompaniment, whereas a classic blues singer would typically perform in front of an ensemble.

Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, born April 26, 1886, in Columbus, Georgia, was a representative of the first generation of blues singers. With her husband Will – sometimes referred to as "Pa Rainey" – she toured the South as part of a traveling show troupe. In the mid-1920s, she recorded extensively and her quivering contralto voice appeared on over 100 records within a five-year period.

Bessie Smith, as a student of Ma Rainey, stands out as the greatest of the classical blues singers. Born on April 15, 1894, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Smith began singing and dancing on street corners for spare change at around the age of nine. In her teenage years, Smith hit the road as a member of Ma Rainey's show troupe, and although Rainey is acknowledged as a mentor and teacher to the young singer, the full extent of that instruction is a matter of speculation.

Smith quickly surpassed his teacher in terms of melody diversity, impressive stage control, and depth of expression. It was inevitable that he decided to leave Rainey to further advance his young singing career. In 1923, Smith's recording of "Down Hearted Blues" catapulted him into widespread fame. The record reportedly sold over half a million copies within just a few months, and Smith soon began recording regularly and performing for up to $2,000 a week. He toured extensively throughout the South and along the eastern coast, entertaining large crowds at both tent shows set up outside cities and theaters in city centers.

Smith had risen from the streets to the largest theater's rear seats without amplification, captivating audiences with his talent. His powerful voice could reach the farthest row of the biggest theater without amplification, and his sharp comedic skills and dominant stage presence allowed him to win over crowds that even Robert Johnson or Son House might have alienated with their troubled, introspective blues. The tragic aspects of blues were softened here by the use of humor and double entendres. Songs such as "Empty Bed Blues," "Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl," "You've Got to Give Me Some," and "Kitchen Man" addressed the topic of sexual intercourse at various levels of subtlety.

Bessie Smith's career, like that of many other first-generation blues singers, was irreparably damaged by economic hardships at the beginning of the 1930s. On September 26, 1937, during a tour in the Deep South, Smith died in a car accident. She was thirty-three years old. Two years later, Ma Rainey would die of a heart attack at fifty-three. The record industry eventually overcame its problems and achieved unprecedented success in the 1940s and subsequent decades, but the classic blues era had come to an end with the deaths of these two major figures.

Scott Joplin and Ragtime

Jazz music, early jazz's precursor, leaves blues in importance behind and perhaps even surpasses its impact. Indeed, during the early days of New Orleans jazz, the line between ragtime and jazz was so fine that the two terms were often used interchangeably.

The ragtime rhythms emerged in print during the early part of the nineteenth century, but the first published ragtime piece is generally considered to be "Mississippi Rag," composed by William Krell in 1897. Later that year, Tom Turpin became the first African American composer of ragtime with his work "Harlem Rag." Both were well-crafted and showed that ragtime was incubating before its publication. By the end of the year, Ben Harney released the instructional book "Rag Time Instructor," which helped fuel and satiate the public's appetite for this intoxicating new music. As the turn of the century approached, the ragtime craze continued unabated, prompting even esteemed critics to take aim at it. The Metronome magazine declared in 1901, "The days of ragtime are numbered. We're sorry to think that one person imagines ragtime has no musical merit. It was a wrong-headed popular fad." That same year, the American Federation of Musicians ordered its members to stop playing ragtime and said, "Musicians know what's good, and if people don't, we'll have to teach them."

During the rapid spread of this new music style, the term 'rag' inevitably became overused and misapplied, often used indiscriminately to describe various African-American musical idioms. As a result, published compositions from this period, even if they deviated from the standard twelve-bar form like the classic rag style known as such, could still use the word 'rag' in their titles. However, as the style evolved, ragtime transformed into a four-part structured form, with each melody typically consisting of sixteen measures. The most common form for these classic rags was AABBACCDD, with modulation to a different key often used for the C theme.

Although initially incorporating vocal works and band arrangements, this style ultimately peaked as a solo piano music form. The spread of this lively new music coincided with the increasing popularity of pianos in American homes during the turn of the century. Notably, between 1890 and 1909, total piano production in the US rose from around 100,000 instruments to over 350,000 per year, with 1909 marking the peak for both American piano production and the number of published ragtime pieces.

The emergence of this unaccompanied ragtime virtuosity was strikingly concentrated in a relatively small geographic area. Like wildflowers blooming in the delta atmosphere of rural blues in Mississippi, early jazz would later flourish around New Orleans, and similarly, early ragtime reached its peak at the turn of the century in Missouri. Cities such as Sedalia, Carthage, and St. Louis served as hubs for many rag composers.

Scott Joplin: The King of Ragtime

Scott Joplin, the greatest among composers, stands out. Indeed, imagining the resurgence of interest in ragtime that began in the 1970s without Joplin's timeless allure is difficult. While others may have written rags with more technically challenging or dramatic musical effects, none approached the structural elegance, melodic innovation, or expressiveness characteristic of Joplin's major works. No other rag composer matched Joplin's ambitions for music – including two operas, a ballet, and other works that challenged the low esteem of the rag idiom.

Joplin was likely born in Texarkana, Texas around 1868. His father, former slave Jiles Joplin, worked as a fiddler at local slave owner's parties in the days leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation, while his mother, Florence Givens Joplin, sang and played the banjo. The last instrument may have had an impact on Scott's musical sensitivities: the syncopated rhythms of nineteenth-century African-American banjo music are precursors to later piano rag styles. The banjo itself has a captivating genealogy – considered a plaything for mountain men and rural folk in America, its roots are clearly African, where various forms can be seen in advance and often associated with minstrels and nobles.

As a child, Scott's father abandoned the family when he was young, leaving his mother to work multiple jobs to support her six children. The future composer had already begun to demonstrate an early affinity for keys at this age. He would frequently accompany his mother to the houses where she worked and play piano while she did chores, improvising as he went along. By adolescence, Joplin had established himself as a professional pianist, performing his art at churches, clubs, and social gatherings throughout the Texas-Arkansas border region.

In about 1897, Scott Joplin wrote "Maple Leaf Rag, which would become the most famous ragtime piece of its era. Two years passed before John Stark published his work, and within the next twelve months only four hundred copies sold. However, by autumn 1900, "Maple Leaf Rag had taken hold among the public, and Stark soon began boasting that he had sold over a million copies of Joplin's composition – if true, this would have been the first published sheet music to reach such a milestone.

Given the relatively small number of professional musicians and music teachers in the US at that time, around 100,000, this commercial success was all the more striking. Amateur pianists, from their own perspective, must have seen that tackling Scott Joplin's famous rag was by no means easy technically and rhythmically; yet, many of them undoubtedly bought sheet music and worked through its complexities.

"Maple Leaf Rag" only hints at the full scope of Joplin's talent. It lacks the melodic subtlety, compositional genius, and emotional depth that distinguishes him from other rag composers. However, its rhythmic intensity still stands out today. To put it simply, it is the most intoxicatingly syncopated of any of Joplin's rags. The essence of ragtime's popularity, as Irving Berlin later suggested, lies in capturing the speed and snappiness of modern American life, and no piece conveys this sensitivity better than "Maple Leaf Rag".

Later Joplin pieces showcased this ambitious African-American composer's mastery of large-scale composition techniques. "Bethena" (1905) parlor waltz refinement, "The Ragtime Dance" (1906) sensuous scherzos, "Pine Apple Rag" (1908) third movement's boogie-woogie influences, and "Solace" (1909) sweeping habanera rhythms such as.

Scott Joplin's later years of life became increasingly occupied by his opera Treemonisha. His music contained very little ragtime; instead, he delved deeply into the African-American musical roots prior to ragtime as well as the full scope of European operatic devices – including orchestration, overtures, recitatives, arias, and choruses. Scott Joplin's later years passed with him becoming increasingly preoccupied with this project, partly due to the massive scale of the work, but perhaps more importantly, the difficulty of securing financial and public support for the endeavor.

In 1915, a single performance took place at a Harlem venue, with an incomplete cast, no stage or costumes, and no orchestra – just the composer playing piano notes. This rigidly staged work, which was more about assimilating established artistic traditions than celebrating African American culture, did not particularly excite the Harlem audience at that time.

After a disastrous performance by Treemonisha, Scott Joplin was hospitalized at the Manhattan State Hospital in the fall of 1916. He died on April 1, 1917, due to syphilis, suffering from "cerebral paralysis-dementia." Although he had yet to reach his fiftieth birthday, Joplin outlived his fame. The ragtime craze had passed in America, and Joplin's popularity had diminished enough that only a few unpublished compositions remained hidden away in the Stark Company's files, which would eventually be lost when the company moved in 1935.

Joplin's determined effort to merge African-American popular music with the mainstream traditions of Western composition foreshadowed, in many respects, jazz's later development. By crossing the boundaries between high culture and low, art music and popular music, African polyrhythm and European formalism, Joplin anticipated the fruitful efforts of later artists such as Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, Paul Whiteman, Benny Carter, Mary Lou Williams, Art Tatum, Charles Mingus, John Lewis, and Wynton Marsalis. In his own time, Joplin's audience—both white and Black—was hardly prepared to grasp the nature of such hybrid efforts; we can easily imagine that they held the prejudice that these different traditions were too radically opposed to allow any seamless merger. The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have struck most on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society as a contradiction. A different aesthetic had to develop before such works could be appreciated on their own terms.

Cultural Synthesis: A Meeting of Musical Traditions

The genre's primary inheritance from African music was the elimination of the distinction between performers and audience typical of Western culture. Additionally, the separation between song and dance was replaced by an inherently African harmony of sound and movement. These ritual gatherings, a mix of ceremonial and social elements, also broke down barriers between spiritual and worldly drives.

The convergence of African and European musical traditions triggered an anthropologists' term called "syncretism" – the blending of previously separate cultural elements. This dynamic, crucial to jazz history, continues to endure even today when African-American performance styles harmoniously blend with Europe, Asia, Latin America, and even Africa itself.

Music's technological and economic context also played an important role in jazz's prehistory. Phonograph records and pianos, among other new technologies, helped spread new music genres. Perhaps most notably, the explosion of ragtime, which served as a precursor to blues and jazz, was largely due to the proliferation of pianos into American homes and the increasing popularity of mechanical player pianos. Between 1890 and 1909, piano production in the US rose from around 100,000 to over 350,000 per year. By 1911, remarkably, 295 separate companies had established piano manufacturing operations in the US.

The story of jazz is, in essence, an intersection of music and society's prehistory. African rhythms, the expression of blues, and ragtime melodies evolved parallel to America's changing social landscape. The blues echoed the hardships and longings experienced during the transition from slavery to freedom. Ragtime reflected the speed and dynamism of modernizing America. And jazz synthesized all these influences, creating something entirely new that remained true to its roots while embracing America's unprecedented changes in the twentieth century.

Lessons Learned from the Roots of Jazz

When examining the history of jazz today, we can learn much from these pioneering musicians. Firstly, real innovation often emerges at the intersection of different traditions. Joplin combined African rhythmic sensibilities with European compositional techniques to create something entirely new. Bessie Smith merged local folk blues traditions with popular theater, while country blues artists blended African narrative traditions with American singing styles to create a completely new form of personal expression.

Breaking boundaries is at the heart of transformative art. Joplin was repeatedly rejected for elevating ragtime to serious music form. Smith and Rainey pushed the moral limits of their time. Robert Johnson redefined how the guitar could be used as an instrument. All of them had the courage to defy the rules of "how things should be."

Thirdly, cultural prejudices often obscure artistic value. Early jazz forms were once dismissed as "primitive" or "uneducated," but today we see them as indispensable parts of American cultural heritage. Bessie Smith's "tragic" and "melancholy" songs are now admired for their raw emotional intensity. Joplin received her posthumous Pulitzer Prize more than half a century after her death.

Ultimately, the strongest music emerges as a response to recent social and cultural changes. The blues documented the difficulties of a people transitioning from slavery to freedom. Ragtime reflected America's rapidly changing rhythm as it industrialized and modernized. And out of their fusion, jazz became the musical expression of America rediscovering itself in the early years of the twentieth century.

From Past to History

The prehistory of jazz is a rich tale of numerous musical traditions intertwining. African call-and-response forms and polyrhythmic traditions met European harmony and compositional techniques. The raw emotional expression of blues merged with the sophisticated structural forms of ragtime. And at its core, there was a human longing for art that transcended racial, social, and cultural barriers – music without boundaries.

In the Congo Square gatherings, where enslaved people came together, the story of jazz's primary cultural synthesis unfolds, showing how one of America's greatest art forms gained existence. These sounds created the prehistory of jazz, capturing both the unique struggles and aspirations of American society, as well as reflecting the universal expression of human spirit through the performances of Robert Johnson's guitar, Ma Rainey's dazzling stage shows, and Scott Joplin's masterful piano pieces.

As we follow this captivating journey, despite many changes over time, one constant theme emerges throughout jazz's evolution: people from different worlds coming together through music's universal language, transcending all barriers. This is not a historical narrative, but a living expression that continues to resonate with human experience today.