Hear that long snake moan - Voodoo and rock music, part 2 - includes bibliography

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1987 by Michael Ventura

HEAR THAT LONG SNAKE MOAN

WE ARE IN New Orleans,circa 1890. We know the depth and range of the African metaphysic as it is alive in the black culture of that moment. The twentieth century is already taking hold. Congo Square has been empty for fifteen years, to become a quiet park and then, in our day, a sports auditorium. (That Indian holy ground seems destined to be the place where people release themselves in abandon.) Bayou St. John and Lake Pontchartrain have seen the last time that thousands would gather in a Voodoo celebration. What observers would describe as genuinely African drumming and dancing would continue in New Orleans into the first part of the twentieth century, but it would no longer be focal to the life there.

The African metaphysic was aboutto blend with black-American needs, European instruments, and Euro-American musical forms to create the first great wave of American music.

The brass band was already an American traditionwhen Sousa's marches swept the country in the 1890s. In New Orleans, the brass band blended with another living. African tradition, vivid in Voodoo: ancestor worship. Not to hire musicians, not to feast at a death, would have been sacrilegious. The liturgy was Christianist now, but the impulse for the ceremony was African--or, to use another word, pagan. For it is no accident that what most closely resembles an old New Orleans funeral is an Irish wake--these are the two modern cultures that are most in touch with their non-Christianist roots.

The more socially acceptable, light-complexioned,and financially well-off Creole musicians--many of whom came from free people of color and not from slaves--tended to play their instruments "correctly,' to read music, and to play for white functions. The darker, poorer, slave-rooted Negroes --as they were called at the time, distinguishing them from Creoles--played a very different music, closer both to Africa and to the blues. These were the people who came directly out of the Congo Square dances and the Lake Pontchartrain celebrations, and they played their Western instruments with the simultaneity, interchange, and percussive force of African music. They looked to their instruments for a different sound entirely, and got it. They played a lot of blues--which was the sound Africans had created when, in the United States, they had been deprived of their drums, forbidden to sing their tribal songs, and usually even forbidden, during slavery, to have their own Christianist churches. The blues was everything African that had been lost, distilled into a sound where it could be found again. And the blues was the losing and the finding, as well. One man could play the blues. So it was a form that allowed one man to preserve, add to, and pass on what in its native form had taken a tribe. Its beat was so implicit that the African, for the first time, didn't need a drum. The holy drum, the drum that is always silent, lived in the blues. One man with a guitar could play the blues and his entire tradition would be alive in his playing. Louis de Lisle "Big Eye' Nelson, considered the first man in New Orleans to play a "hot' clarinet, told Alan Lomax from his final sickbed in the 1940s, "The blues? Ain't no first blues. The blues always been. Blues is what cause the fellows to start jazzing.'

Everyone there at the time said that thefirst man to play what came to be called "jazz' was the cornet player Buddy Bolden, sometime in the early 1890s. And what he usually played was the blues.

Here was the African metaphysic distilledby American circumstances into an extraordinarily supple form and played on European instruments with African simultaneity in an American-marching-band lineup. Here was the fruit of the hundred years' cohesion of New Orleans black culture--the sense of shared heritage, the sense of identity, fostered and exemplified by Marie Laveau. Here was a metaphysics finding, for the first time, an authentically American voice. What had been played at Congo Square was African music. What was played by Sousa and the popular songsters of the time was still a music derivative of Europe--especially of English music halls and Scotch-Irish airs. What Buddy Bolden started to play was American music. Within thirty years its impact would make an American tune instantly distinguishable from a European tune, no matter how strait-laced the music. And it would be a music, in all its forms, that would reject Puritan America. Even at its mildest it would have a beat, and in that beat would be everything that denied the split between the mind and the body.

In rural blues, all this had been and would be implicitin the tense containment of the form. In Buddy Bolden's music, the implicit would instantly become explicit.

Buddy Bolden. "On those old, slow blues,' trombonistBill Matthews remembered, "that boy could make the women jump out a window. On those old slow, low-down blues, he had a moan in his cornet that went all through you, just like you were in church or something.' Words are as close as we'll get to how Buddy Bolden sounded--no black jazz band recorded till 1920, and none recorded extensively until 1923; a precious quarter-century lost-- but it's significant that people talking about this very secular music very often reach for sacred images. "Like you were in church or something.'