ABSTRACT
The most apparent survivals of African music in Afro-American music are its rhythms: not only the seeming emphasis in the African music on rhythmic, rather than melodic or harmonic, qualities, but also the use of polyphonic, or contrapuntal, rhythmic effects. The Western concept of the cultivation of the voice is foreign to African or Afro-American music. In the West, only the artifact can be beautiful, mere expression cannot be thought to be. The immediate predecessors of blues were the Afro-American/American Negro work songs, which had their musical origins in West Africa. Musicologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even some from the twentieth, would speak of the "aberration" of the diatonic scale in African music. Melodic diversity in African music came not only in the actual arrangements of notes but in the singer's vocal interpretation. The important aspect of African music found very readily in the American Negro's music is the antiphonal singing technique.
