ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of African American folk and popular styles through the 1970s. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the North America colonies were not nearly as profitable as those in the West Indies, where the population increased rapidly and Africans were brought in vast numbers. The practices that governed performance by these renegade Methodists were virtually identical to those of the basic folk spiritual or ring shout, illustrating the ability of African Americans to transform genres that they themselves did not create into musical expressions with cultural relevance. Although the literature on African American music is uneven in quality, it presents varying interpretations, including those of African Americans, whose views were excluded from the musical canon before the 1970s and 1980s. The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed new trends in black music production as the tradition became appropriated and reinvented in global contexts.
