In 1914 the critic American Music Krehbiel wrote: "because then savages no musical or artistic tradition in general should be given a more refined aesthetic sensibility of peoples who for centuries to cultivate the music, this goes beyond my limited understanding." was a day of 1619. A load of dozens of African slaves, torn from a English vessel during a boarding, landed on the coast of the U.S. Virginia. The origins of the blues and rumba is confirmed, as well as in their forms of artistic expression-choral-music intimately linked together, the events of history. Their story tells of oppressed peoples, the lives of ordinary passions and feelings common to unexpected creative energies. In the nineteenth century, in an America still a land of slaves to which the landowners could ban everything, even "to meet with the intention of drinking and dancing," the musical traditions of African Americans began to reverberate in entertainment shows, the "Minstrel show, entr'actes humor directed at blacks, guilty of loving madly in their music. The king of the blues, BB King, with respect to his difficulty in communicating with words, wrote: "When I was a child, stuttered: I could not express what I felt inside. (...) The words I have friends: music, however,.. That music was a lifeline for people forced to hard labor in the plantations, it shows the rich singing tradition that expressed just as they worked (the "Work Song") or while praying (the "spiritual"). Usually accompanied by clapping, (sometimes dances), these vocalizations were telling emotions of hope, feelings of the performer and, of course, the listener. So it was that "slavery created the blues." Ernest Anserment clarifies this step in the history of music: "The blues began when black is sad, away from home, the mother ... then think of a reason ... takes the trombone or drum or singing or dancing and plumb the depths of his imagination. " Both blacks deported to South America that those confined, for example, lived on the island of Cuba horrific conditions of deprivation. The freedom in Cuba was reached in 1886. In the homeland of the poet Jose Marti, a people who until then was not worthy "to belong even to the human race," radically changed their way of life, became free. The road to independence in the "isla major" Afro-Cuban who was traveled by many from the countryside poured into the new building that opened in urban areas. The rumba early assumed a negative value: in the first collective festivities organized in the slums of the barrios marinales, generally the more widespread, was not dancing, but prostitution, it took some time before the term "Rumba" was identified with the word "dance." What is the rumba Ruben Blades puts it in his text: "To be Rumbero you crying, you have to be Rumbero rice, you must have dreamed of having lived, for you must feel inside Rumbero sweet emotions that agitate your feelings ... " throughout the American continent, therefore, went on stage the art of body gestures (dance), the sad and melancholy vocal (singing), the musical worship (praying). A cornerstone of the culture of American blacks it was the religion. In America, as in the islands discovered by Columbus, had tragic aspects Christianity: mass conversions among Caribbean people, or even spontaneous adhesions break down racial barriers in America. The hymns of blacks converted to Christianity (the spiritual song) were built on the songs for the melodic part of Europe and to the syncopated African rhythm part on. But in an America largely Protestant Africans had little opportunity to realize that religious syncretism is typical of Catholic culture of the New World. In Cuba, however, the multitude of saints was easily replaced by gods of different religions in Africa West. The "Santeria" was part of religious life, ritual music, love of rhythmic polyphony, melodies and primal "... deep Afro-Cuban spirituality that does not want and can not die, as stated in the Yoruba ancient prophecy, and take new shape ". (Leonardo Acosta). American music critic at the "savage" African Americans have already given an answer: the rhythms of rumba and blues, full of sensitivity, feeling and taste, the harbingers of an infinite variety of songs and dances, have forwarded the concept of good as it can be free feeding of their stories, traditions and music that belong to the heritage of all mankind.
Bibliography:
Amiri Baraka, The people of the blues. Sociology of African Americans through jazz , Shake
BB King and David Ritz, Blues around me. The Autobiography of BB King , Feltrinelli
Alan Lomax, The land of the blues. Mississippi Delta, trip origin of black music.
Enzo Conte, Salsa Y Bayle, Editor Gremesse;
Besito de Coco, Corazon Editions minimum
Marco Pasetto. Jazz. The way of Afro-American music .
