ABSTRACT
The South has long occupied center stage in popular and scholarly understandings of American music. Southern music is distinctive and regional, and yet globalizing into a multitude of other musical genres. The introduction of Christianity to the enslaved population played a crucial role in emerging musical traditions in the South. The combined cultures of enslaved Africans and the changing social and religious environment surrounding them resulted in a new African American folk music tradition. Despite the distinct musicological characteristics mentioned earlier—syncopation, improvisation, virtuosity—jazz, much like all southern musical styles, developed out of a variegated cultural system in which cross-racial influence infected it at every level. In protest music throughout the twentieth-century South, religious song was used to traverse the racial divide and enact social change. Nonetheless, many of the songs composed and performed were arranged versions of the Protestant hymnody learned in camp meeting circles with white and black co-participants.
