ABSTRACT
The African American musical tradition stretches back to songs and laments brought from Africa on the Middle Passage. Work songs, 'shouts', and spirituals were always part of the lives of African Americans. In the 20th century, black Americans fashioned entirely new and significant musical traditions onto the older genres, including jazz, blues, and rock 'n' roll. With the advent of new technologies like radio and sound recording, African American music spread across the globe. In the early 1900s, blacks from the Mississippi Delta and various other regions in the South developed a distinctive musical style called the blues. Ragtime, a distinctive new musical form that composers like Scott Joplin fashioned out of classically European and American techniques, was popular at the same time. The blues also survived on its own, and artists like Ma Rainey, Robert Johnson, and Tampa Red each made contributions to the music's unique communication of loneliness and longing.
