Reggae got Blues :: essays papers

Reggae got Blues Introduction No food on my table, no shoes to go on my feet No food on my table and no shoes to go on my feet, My children cry for mercy, Lord they ain't got no place to call their own. The blues arose as both a social protest and a means for expression by the Afro-American slave. The institution of slavery had existed before the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but never before had a race suffered such discrimination; oppression and poverty as the West Africans have endured for the last four hundred years. " The African’s sole purpose in America was, for the most part, to provide the cheapest agricultural labor possible to procure"(Baraka, 3). Previous forms of slavery (Roman and Greek) utilized the intellectual capability of slaves, where as the institution of slavery in the Americas treated slaves like that of property, a master would relate to his slave as, ". if you twist the knob on your radio you expect it to play"(Baraka, 3). This, the non-human view of slaves that existed, viewed Africans as heathens and thought them to be primitive and inferior to the Euro-American. These so-called nonliterate peoples whose traditional histories were passed down generati on to generation through oral tradition, were seen as primitive to the highly industrialized Euro-Americans. The profound beliefs and concepts of one culture (African) become absurd and intangible for a complete opposite culture (Euro-American)(Baraka, 7). Not only were the West Africans aliens to the their physical surroundings but aliens to a new "philosophical system"(Baraka, 7). With this in mind the West Africans who survived the western passage across the Atlantic to the Mississippi Delta had found a similar Jamaican Babylon and, " Lord they ain’t got no place to call there own". The blues are an extension of the West African oral tradition through spirituals, worksongs, seculars, and field hollers. From the late eighteen hundreds to the mid twentieth century afro- American’s have been slaves to King Cotton in the form of bound slavery, tenant farming and sharecropping. The endless cycle of debt, has Blues music centered on movement from oppression, and poverty w hile the protest may not always take serious form. I will examine the music of the Delta blues looking for connections to the mento/early reggae era in religious, social and lastly lyrical context. RELIGION African religions usually have a tight fit with a particular culture, language and belief system.