Muslim roots of the blues

In today's San Francisco Chronicle: Muslim roots of the blues "The music of famous American blues singers reaches back through the South to the culture of West Africa."

"Sylviane Diouf knows her audience might be skeptical, so to demonstrate the connection between Islam and American blues music, she'll play two recordings: The Muslim call to prayer (the religious recitation that's heard from mosques around the world), and "Levee Camp Holler" an early type of blues song that first sprang up in the Mississippi Delta more than 100 years ago.

"Levee Camp Holler" is no ordinary song. It's the product of ex-slaves who worked moving earth all day in post-Civil War America. The version that Diouf uses in presentations has lyrics that, like the call to prayer, speak about a glorious God. ("Well, Lord, I woke up this mornin', man, I feelin' bad . . . Well, I was thinkin' 'bout the good times, Lord, I once have had.") But it's the song's melody and note changes that closely parallel one of Islam's best-known refrains. As in the call to prayer, "Levee Camp Holler" emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter's vocal chords. Dramatic changes in musical scales punctuate both "Levee Camp Holler" and the call to prayer. A nasal intonation is evident in both.

"I did a talk a few years ago at Harvard where I played those two things, and the room absolutely exploded in clapping, because (the connection) was obvious," says Diouf, an author and scholar who is also a researcher at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. "People were saying, 'Wow. That's really audible. It's really there.' "

"It's really there because of all the Muslim slaves from West Africa who were taken by force to the United States for three centuries, from the 1600s to the mid-1800s. Upward of 30 percent of the African slaves in the United States were Muslim, and an untold number of them spoke and wrote Arabic, historians say now."

The MPEG file of the prayer and the blues shout side by side is here. The muezzin in the clip doesn't have half the musicality of some of the guys I used to hear in Cairo and in South Lebanon, however.

The Dove used to lie in bed at her uncle's house at dawn, listening to the call to prayer echoing down the valley from the Muslim village on the next hill. The sound of the call to prayer has always made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and tears prickle my eyes. A good muezzin puts his soul into the call. In Cairo there were so many muezzins so close together that you could compare styles: the angry shouter with a raspy voice and no sense of pitch, the liquid-voiced crooner who sounded calm and inviting all at once, or the straightforward purist just doing his job. I am not a Muslim, but the call to Islamic prayers opened my heart to that religion.

Now I find that this tradition informed the blues shout, the African wail that also gives me the shivers. I always thought of the blues as the true roots of my American musical soul. As the daughter of a white Southern mother, I felt a kinship to the blues. It's the music of African Americans, but just as with the Islamic call to prayer - if you grow up next door to it, hearing the real thing, as I did in Greensboro NC when we went on Sunday drives in the country, or visited black churches as part of some civil rights event or other - you fall in love with the sound, and it becomes part of your DNA, your soul imprint. When I am in America, I miss hearing the call to prayer. When I have lived in the Middle East for too long, I miss hearing the blues.

Amazing, if true, that two different streams perhaps flow from the same source.

There's a whole lot more to be said there about slavery, and Muslim involvement in the slave trade, and the racism of my white Southern and Lebanese ancestors, but all that is the ugly part of the story. For now, let's just listen to those voices and hear the spirit.

Comments

[Alison]

The deep connection between the blues and North African music is a rather poorly kept secret. Check out for example the excellent two-CD set called _Desert Blues_ that was put out by Frankfurt's Network label in 1995. Or, for something bluesy from 2003, there's Malouma's sizzling _Dunya_ CD from Mauritania. Veils and turbans abound on performers who make you want to get up and dance. Malouma could show R.L. Burnside and Muddy Waters a thing or two.