African-American Music With AA Literature

¶ … African-American music with AA literature

Importance of African-American music in AA literature

Music receives a truly hallowed position in African-American literature. A passion for music, especially African-American music, should come as no surprise. After all, African-American ("Black") music has been and still is the dominant influence on modern American popular music, which now captivates and influences most of the world's audiences. American Pop music, even Hip-Hop itself, has penetrated countries as isolated as Guam and Ghana. Thesis: Music is emphasized so much because music is the only distinguishing feature of African-American culture which is exclusively positive.

The Development of African-American Culture and Art (Music)

The migration of many talented, ambitious Blacks from the Agricultural South after Reconstruction to urban areas further north set the conditions for an artistic flowering which revealed the unique culture of African-Americans. These rural emigrants would create a livelihood for themselves and many educated themselves at the many colleges and universities in their new environs. Some of them chose to create the type of art that they had been exposed to, "taught," in their universities and in their acculturation in the urban North.

Others, however, could not ignore their upbringing in the agricultural South when creating art. These writers and artists would express what was real to them in a manner which felt natural to them. The result has come to be known as the "Harlem Renaissance," where the seeds of Black identity came to fruition.

In the Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, one of the greatest African-American writers, Langston Hughes attested to the significance of negro art in expressing the negro identity. He declared that "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame." (Hughes). The audience and observers were impressed by the talent of these Black artists but often shocked by their subject matter, eventually grouping and labeling them as a "Negro-Art" movement. 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 Feature