Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in 1838, wrote in his Narrative of 1845 that outsiders often took the singing of enslaved people as a sign of contentment. He knew better: "Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart." From that sorrow, and the resilience that answered it, came roots of much of the world's popular music.

African roots, American soil

Enslaved Africans brought musical habits that survived even where drums were banned, as many colonial authorities feared drums could signal revolt. Call and response, polyrhythm, bent pitches and a close bond between music and movement carried over from West and Central African traditions. Work songs set the pace of labor in fields and on railroads. Field hollers, long solo calls, carried across open land. In New Orleans, enslaved and free Black people gathered on Sundays at Congo Square to drum, sing and dance, one of the few places in North America where such gatherings went on in the open.

Spirituals

Spirituals are religious folk songs created by enslaved African Americans, blending Christian scripture with African vocal style. Many tell of Moses, the Exodus and crossing the river Jordan, stories of a people delivered from bondage. A song such as "Go Down, Moses" could carry a double meaning, longing for heaven and longing for freedom on earth; how often particular songs served as coded escape instructions is still debated.

In 1871 a small group of students from Fisk University, a new school for freed people in Nashville, set out on tour to raise money to save their school from bankruptcy. The Fisk Jubilee Singers brought spirituals to concert audiences in the United States and Europe, sang for Queen Victoria, and raised enough to build the university's first permanent building, Jubilee Hall.

Ragtime and the blues

Ragtime, a syncopated piano style, swept the country around 1900; Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899) sold strongly as sheet music. Around the same time, in the Mississippi Delta and across the rural South, the blues took shape.

The most common blues form is the twelve bar blues, built on three chords in a fixed pattern. Its lyrics often follow an AAB pattern: a line, the same line again, then an answering line. Singers and players use blue notes, pitches bent slightly below the standard scale, which give the blues its aching sound and come partly from African vocal practice. The blues sang of hard work, travel, love, loss and injustice, often with humor.

In 1920 Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" became the first blues record by a Black singer, and it sold so well that record companies began making records aimed at Black buyers, marketed as "race records." Singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith became stars.

Jazz

Jazz arose in New Orleans in the early 1900s from blues, ragtime, brass band marches, church music and Caribbean rhythms. Improvisation, inventing music in the moment, is central to jazz, along with swing, a lilting rhythmic feel easier to hear than to define. Early New Orleans bands improvised collectively, trumpet, clarinet and trombone weaving lines together. The first jazz record, in 1917, was made by a white group, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, a sign of who had access to studios. Louis Armstrong's recordings of the late 1920s made the improvised solo the heart of jazz, and as Black southerners moved north in the Great Migration, jazz moved to Chicago and New York.

Gospel

Thomas A. Dorsey, a former blues pianist, is often called the father of gospel music for blending the blues with sacred song. Some ministers at first rejected his music as too worldly. After his wife and newborn son died in 1932, he wrote "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," a plea for strength that became one of the most loved gospel songs and a favorite of Mahalia Jackson. Gospel's soaring voices and exchanges with the congregation later passed into soul music through singers such as Aretha Franklin, who grew up singing in her father's church.

Worked example: hearing a twelve bar blues

W. C. Handy, a trained bandleader, later recalled that around 1903, waiting for a train at Tutwiler, Mississippi, he heard a man press a knife against his guitar strings, sliding it to bend the notes, while singing about the place where two railroad lines crossed. Handy found it the strangest music he had ever heard. He went on to publish blues as sheet music, and his "St. Louis Blues" (1914) became one of the most recorded songs of its era.

Its first verse shows the AAB form clearly (spelling modernized from the dialect of the 1914 sheet music): "I hate to see the evening sun go down, / Hate to see the evening sun go down, / 'Cause my baby, he done left this town."

The first line states a feeling. The repeat gives the singer time to think and the band room to answer, often with an instrumental fill: call and response inside one song. The third line explains. Underneath, the twelve bars move from the home chord to a second chord and back, then to a third chord and home. Once you feel that cycle, you will hear it in thousands of songs, from Chicago blues to early rock and roll, descendants of musicians whose names were mostly never written down.