Although the Negro-Art movement included novelists and visual artists, it was the poets and bandleaders who became the face of the Harlem Renaissance. It is in the field of music that African-American Art has had the most widespread and enduring success and influence. Music as the Dominant Art in Black Culture

The musicality of Black culture is caused by its Southern, agricultural roots. As with all people laboring on a farm in hot weather for long periods of time, Blacks passed the time with song. These songs are typically considered as a society's folk music. It is typically catchy, simple, and characterized by motion, as a diddy or nursery rhyme is. Unlike a society's formal music, such as classical music or modern pop music, folk songs are of unknown origin and are not performed by professional musicians.

As a Positive Distinguishing...

In fact, may be considered the only positive distinguishing feature of African-American culture. The other hallmark features of African-American culture, an inferiority complex, a male absence in the familial structure, and an outsider status, are not positive in the most basic sense, and are actually quite regrettable.
A Demonstration of the Faculty for Pure Creation

Black music represents action and creation on the part of African-Americans, instead of reaction. Creation cannot come out of reaction, which is only capable of producing emulation or its opposite, conscious rebellion. This rebellion, even if it produces something new, is never truly creative because it is restrained by the object of rebellion.