ABSTRACT
The work song was one of the earliest types of black American music and was strongly influenced by the type of music the blacks had known in Africa. Most of the Africans' traditional leisure pursuits could not take shape in America because the slaves spent most of their time working. Thus drums, which for many Africans were their main musical instrument, were banned in many states for fear that they would be used to start a rebellion and to communicate messages to other slaves at a distance. A black musician called Scott Joplin, from St Louis in the midwest of America helped to make ragtime famous. In fact, the sound of black musicians' instruments is often very harsh to European listeners. This chapter brief survey of some of the major developments in black American music in the nineteenth century.
