jump — 1. to spring free from the ground, to move suddenly or involuntarily. 2. a form of R&B music that places emphasis on strong rhythm, exciting solo work especially by saxophones, and vocals in a shout-blues manner.

R & B (rhythm & blues) – a kind of music developed by African-Americans that combines blues and jazz, characterized by a strong backbeat and repeated variations on syncopated instrumental phrases.

R&B was originally defined as the specifically African-American pop music of its day.  Jerry Wexler, who was later to help shape the sound of soul music as the producer of Aretha Franklin, was a writer for Billboard magazine in 1949. That year he coined the term R&B, as a name for the magazine’s black music chart.  “Rhythm and Blues” replaced the term “race music”, which records intended for distribution in African-American communities had been called since the early days of sound recording.  With the big band swing era coming to a close at the end of World War II, many of the big dance bands turned to be-bop, a new approach to improvisation that many people found inscrutable and undanceable.  During the Second World War, the mass migration from the South of African-Americans headed to work in Northern defense industries brought with them a taste for rural blues.  Both country and city blues began to fuse with riff-based remnants of big-band jazz and led to an alternative to bop that was both highly danceable and hugely popular, called “jump.” Another form of R&B was primarily vocal, with instrument backing varying from full orchestra to none at all.  Usually performed by a group, the style employed close harmonies and was nearly always performed in a subdued and medium-to-slow tempo.  The influence of the African-American church was evident, the lead voice tended to the upper register and often performed over the wordless chords of the other voices or engaged them in call-and-response.  Groups like the Ink Spots exemplified this style, which was a direct precursor to doo-wop.

Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five was one of the most popular groups of the R & B era, and the beat and personality of Jordan’s horn-driven combo set the stage for rock and roll before there was even a name for it.  When big bands were all the rage, Jordan outsold them all with a small combo, as most rock musicians later did. He was one of the first to join electric guitar and bass with horns, and his over-the-beat spoken monologues are a prototype of rap music.  Chuck Berry, Little Richard and other first generation rock and rollers  — who were often also R&B artists themselves — included Louis Jordan among their most important influences.
The music that DJ Alan Freed first called ”rock and roll” on his Cleveland radio show in 1952 was actually R&B.  All of the artists who performed at Freed’s 1952 Moondog Coronation Ball, identified as the first rock and roll concert, were R&B artists.  “Rock and roll” was a term that had existed in African-American venacular since the turn of the 20th Century as a euphemism for sex.  The term had cropped up in numerous blues, jazz and R&B hits from the Twenties through the Fifties, and Freed latched onto the term to identify the music he played on his wildly popular and influential radio show, perhaps perversely to disguise the music’s black origins to his growing white audience even as he imitated black DJs in his jive-laced on-the-air patter.

Early rock and roll hits were often faithful imitations of, or actual R&B songs recorded by white performers, like Bill Haley & the Comets’ Number Seven pop remake of Big Joe Turner’s Number One R&B hit, “Shake, Rattle & Roll.”  The crossover success of black music on the pop charts by groups like the Dominoes, Moonglows and Orioles in the Forties and Fifties did not inspire a warm welcome to black artists on white record labels and pop radio playlists, but instead prompted white artists to raid the R&B charts for material — The McGuire Sisters’ 1955 remake of the Moonglows’ “Sincerely” being a prime example.  The Moonglows’ R&B hit reached Number One in December, 1954, and had begun an assent on the pop charts when the McGuire Sisters’ version was released in January, 1955.  The McGuire Sisters’ version topped the pop chart for ten weeks while the Moonglows’ original version made a slow climb to Number 20, at that time an almost unbelievable success for black artists on the pop charts. Pat Boone’s early career was based almost entirely on recording bloodless but commercially successful versions of R&B hits, like Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” and Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruiti” and “”Long Tall Sally.”   Elvis Presley, the crowned “King of Rock and Roll,” found early success with songs previously recorded by black artists, like Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” and Big Mama Thornton’s 1953 hit “Hound Dog.”  Elvis embodied the fulfillment of record producer and Sun Records owner Sam Phillips’ dream of a white artist who could sing with “the sound and feel of a black man.”

– Meredith Rutledge for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

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juke (of West African origin, akin to Wolof dzug, to live wickedly) – a roadside drinking establishment that offers cheap drinks, food and music for dancing, often blues music.

the blues (Middle English, short for blue devils, a feeling of despondency) – 1. depressed spirits; despondency; melancholy.  2. a song, originating with African-Americans, that is marked by the frequent occurrence of blue or flattened notes. 3.  the genre constituting such songs.

“Having the blues” was a ubiquitous expression that had been around as a description for melancholia since the “blue devils” of Elizabethan England.  The term became associated with the body of work that is the basic vocabulary for all American popular music around the turn of the last century.  The blues’ evolution started with West African chord structures and poetic forms that developed in the cotton and rice fields of the Mississippi Delta, Georgia and the Carolinas and Texas into African-American work songs and spirituals.  By mid-19th century the form had coalesced into dance tunes called “jump-ups,” and by the turn of the 20th, the blues as we know it had taken shape.  The first true blues was performed by singers who would engage in call-and-response with a guitar – the performer would sing a line, and the guitar, often played with a bottleneck or knife sliding up and down the strings, giving the instrument an eerie, voice-like moan, would answer.  Both the call-and -response format and the imitation of vocal sounds by instruments are direct influences from West African music.

Early blues was irregular and followed the patterns of speech.  As the style evolved, a standard form was set: a statement was made in the first four bars, repeated (sometimes with a slight variation) in the next four, and answered and commented on in the last four.  The story of a typical blues is autobiographical, frank and earthy, and mostly concerned with basic human problems – money, hard luck, traveling, love and sex — and any combination thereof.  The tempo can vary widely and the mood can be perversely upbeat or range from total despair to cynicism and satire.

There are three distinct regional styles of the blues: Delta blues, Piedmont blues, and Texas blues.  Delta blues is the most influential and familiar of the three, with talking vocal lines and rhythmic guitar accompaniment. Charley Patton, Son House, Johnny Shines and Robert Johnson all played blues in the Delta style.  The blues of Georgia and the Carolinas, or Piedmont blues, is strongly influenced by ragtime and Anglo-Irish folk music.  Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller were representative of this style. Texas blues features high, clear singing and the guitar is plucked instead of strummed. Blind Lemon Jefferson was the most well-known Texas bluesman.

A researcher visiting the Mississippi Delta from Harvard’s Peabody Museum wrote the first published descriptions of the blues in 1903.  At around that same time, W.C. Handy and Ma Rainey, two seasoned professional African-American entertainers of the era, told similar stories of discovering this strange “new” music that they had heard around the back of the show tent (in Ma Rainey’s case) or waiting for a train at the station (in Handy’s).  Both performers incorporated blues tunes into their acts and noticed the overwhelming response from audiences.  Ma Rainey forged a link between rural blues of the South and classic city blues and influenced blues singers from Bessie Smith to Ruth Brown, Etta James and LaVern Baker to Janis Joplin. W.C Handy went on to become known as “The Father of the Blues,” and in 1909 he debuted his “Memphis Blues,” the first published blues.

The blues jumped off of front porches and out of juke joints, which were the fonts of plantation booze and music that spawned the likes of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and it jumped onto the wire as radio broadcasts out of the Delta and sound recordings spread the music across the South.  The first known blues record was Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” released in 1920.  The Depression and the World Wars loaded the blues onto trains and buses with thousands of African-Americans as they headed North to seek a better life.  When the blues hit Chicago and Detroit it got electrified as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker picked up electric guitars.  Country blues became urbanized and amplified, and gained a corresponding sophistication and edginess as city blues evolved, laying the groundwork for a musical revolution that would provide the formal basis for all succeeding American musical styles, including rock and roll.

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– Meredith Rutledge for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

jungle boogie (jungle –oft attrib to Hindi jangal + boogie – prob alter of bogle – goblin, object of fear) a 1974 hit by Kool & the Gang, frequently sampled by hip-hop artists, perhaps the funkiest piece of music ever recorded.

funk (French dialectical funquer – to give off smoke) 1. A type of popular music combining elements of jazz, blues and soul and characterized by syncopated rhythm and a heavy, repetitive bass line. 2. a strong, offensive, unwashed odor.

Funk stroked onto the music scene in the late Sixties, fueled by the rise of the civil rights movement, the growth of African-American consciousness as expressed by writers like Nikki Giovanni and LeRoi Jones, comics like Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory, and the growing influence of African-American record labels such as Stax / Volt in Memphis and Philadelphia International. Funk can be understood as a cross-pollination of soul, rock and jazz, with an emphasis on African-American identity and presentation.

Funk, in African-American vernacular, originally meant “a highly identifiable and/or offensive odor” or “smelly.” By the late ‘60s, “funky” grew to represent all sorts of characteristics that were earthy, musty, shady, physical, emotional, sexual, sweaty – diametrically opposed to anything clinical, judgmental, or antiseptic — characteristics often associated with caucasians, the ruling class, or “the man.” By identifying yourself with “funk,” you identify yourself as the “other.” You elevate the status of the underdog and reject a polar mode of thinking, working towards an integration of opposites. Funk music, in its best form, is the integration of both halves of human consciousness – ego and id, heart and loins, black and white – in the words of funkmeister George Clinton, “the groove that makes you think.”

Funk music can be traced back to the days of the jazz offshoot be-bop and its inheritors and to the roots of rock and roll — Louis Jordan, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Robert Johnson, Little Richard – African-American musicians who were not ashamed of themselves, who took chances, challenged the musical mores of their day and became great innovators in the continuum of African-American music.

While James Brown is considered by many to be the first overtly funky artist (many funkologists identify Brown’s 1964 hit “Out of Sight” as the first funk record, others swear by the Isley Brothers’ 1964 release “Testify, Pts. 1 & 2,” featuring searing lead guitar by Jimi Hendrix), other artists were experimenting with the sound that was to be known as funk — the Meters in New Orleans, Otis Redding, Booker T & The MGs and Al Green in Memphis, Ike & Tina, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and other artists in cities across America were all feeling the funk — shifting the emphasis from the backbeat of R&B to the heavy downbeat on the first beat of the measure, dropping it “on the one,” and filling the spaces with horns and guitar, while the bass was elevated from solely rhythm to a force of its own. Sly Stone’s integrated Family introduced an unsuspecting nation to funk at Woodstock. Funk “orchestras” soon became the norm: seas of vocalists, walls of horns, guitars and percussion sections, decked out in flashy, fantastic costumes and jamming together in choreographed time-step. Parliament-Funkadelic, Earth Wind & Fire, The Ohio Players and the Commodores made funk the ultimate party music, not just with their bizarre conceptual humor, but their sheer excess — huge ensembles of musicians and dancers, all jamming on the same groove as long as they possibly could, people levitating, huge props flown in from the wings, fireworks and flame-throwers, pure spectacle!

Funk as a genre almost did not survive the 1980’s. Disco was a funk-derived genre, and its rise and the later “disco sucks” backlash created an environment hostile to all sorts of African-American music. The availability and convenience of the synthesizer and the drum machine made large funk bands seem cumbersome and economically obsolete. Artists like Prince, Cameo and Kool and the Gang successfully adapted to the new environment to survive and achieved chart success through the ‘80s and ‘90s as funk paved the way for the next development in African-American music — hip-hop.

– Meredith Rutledge for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

jam (origin unknown) – 1. to drive or wedge forcibly into a tight position. 2. to fill often to excess. 3. to make unintelligible by sending out interfering messages or signals. 4. to force one’s way into a restricted space. 5. to take part in a musical jam session.

hip-hop – (hip — derived from the African Wolof language hipi– to open one’s eyes, to be aware; hop – derived from Old English hoppen– to move with light, bounding skips or leaps) – the popular street culture of inner-city youth, characterized by graffiti art, break dancing, and rap music.

Not since the early days of rock and roll has a Black-driven cultural phenomenon taken such a strong hold of mainstream American society as hip-hop. Begun in African- and Caribbean-American dance clubs, discos and block parties in the South Bronx section of New York City in the late Seventies, hip-hop became identified with four related artistic expressions: the turntable wizardry of the DJ, the directly African-derived rhythmic recitation tradition of the MC, the spray-can dexterity of the graffiti artist and the explosive gymnastics of the break dancer.

The standard repertoire of the DJ consisted of deconstructing and reassembling “found sound,” or “sampling” — using the turntable as an instrument. Selling recordings that included sampled music came with its own set of problems, calling into question copyright and intellectual property rights. Some artists claimed that by sampling recordings of a Black artist like George Clinton or James Brown (the two most sampled artists), they were challenging white corporate America and the recording companies’ right to own Black cultural expression. Be that as it may, this explanation didn’t take into account James Brown’s, George Clinton’s, and other artists’ right to own, control, and be compensated for the use of their own intellectual property. By the early 90s, a system of compensation was developed for sampled artists, and exposure of the work of earlier artists through sampling engendered a sense of musical history among younger Black (and white) audiences. DJ Spooky says, “I think of sampling as a form of ancestor worship.”

DJs, at first, provided a backdrop for other aspects of the burgeoning hip-hop movement, specifically dancing and graffiti art. But by the late Seventies, DJs became an attraction of their own and dancers would stop in their tracks to watch a skillful turntablist. DJs recruited MCs, or “mic controllers,” to keep people moving by instigating call-and-response or urging the crowd to “get up” or “get down” or “jam on the beat.” MCs’ exhortations have origins in the performances of James Brown, in the gospel tradition, and can be traced back to musical traditions of West Africa. Grandmaster Flash’s MCs, the Furious Five, completed the development of rap when they began speaking in rhyme to the rhythm of the music. In 1979 the first rap records appeared, “King Tim III,” by the Fatback Band, and “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang.

The thematic content of a lot of rap — the concerns of daily life, stinging social commentary, humorous boasting or playfully attacking a competitor — comes directly from African musical traditions and African- and Caribbean-American “toasting” and “signifying.” Rap also draws from the urban street jive that developed in Chicago in the Twenties. Rap, like jive-talk, subverts standard usage and creates a code language that only the initiated can understand, an African-American cultural survival tool utilized since slavery times. Rappers also referenced the patter of jive-talking radio DJs from the Fifties onwards. In the 1960s, Black Nationalist H. “Rap” Brown’s oratory style not only inspired rap, but also gave it a name. By the late 60s, the Watts Prophets, on the West Coast, and East Coast Last Poets, pioneered a style of proto-rap by setting H. Rap Brown’s speaking style to a rhythmic, musical backdrop.

Whether hip-hop primarily reflects the culture from which it arises – the violence, despair, the sexism – or gives vent to the frustrations of that culture, remains a question. What is clear is that hip-hop’s main concerns, from simple human relationships to the burning social questions of the day, echo the voices and traditions of every African-American musical genre throughout the generations.

– Meredith Rutledge for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame

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jive (origin unknown) – 1. the jargon of jazz musicians or enthusiasts. 2. deceptive, nonsensical or glib talk. 3. to play or dance to jive music.

jazz (Origin unknown) — 1. music originating in New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th century and subsequently developing through various increasingly complex styles, generally marked by intricate, propulsive rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, virtuosic solos, melodic freedom, varying degrees of improvisation and often deliberate distortions of pitch and timbre ranging from simple scale playing, through chromaticism, to atonality. 2. liveliness; spirit; excitement.

Jazz comes from the mixture of blues, ragtime, brass-band and syncopated dance music that could be heard in the streets of the Storyville red-light district of New Orleans at the turn of the last century. The first music known as jazz was the New Orleans style, (later called Dixieland) in which each player in a small group would collectively improvise, or improvise in such a way that the parts combined into a balanced, integrated whole.

Jelly Roll Morton is considered the first true jazz composer – he was the first to write down his jazz arrangements in musical notation — “Jelly Roll Blues,” in 1915, was the first published jazz arrangement in history — and Jelly Roll wrote many of the songs that would become staples in the jazz repertory.  In the Twenties virtuosos like trumpeter Louis Armstrong began to fly high on solo lines separate from the accompanying instruments, which became the formative idea of jazz for the next few decades.

The big band swing era of the Thirties and Forties brought harmonic and rhythmic revolutions to jazz, exemplified by the work of Count Basie and Duke Ellington.  Ellington has been called “perhaps the single most important creative talent in American popular music history.”  The Duke’s unparelled genius as a composer ranged from three-minute pop jewels like “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing),” the song that gave the swing era its name, to ambitious works like “Black, Brown and Beige,” a 50-minute classical-style suite introduced at Carnegie Hall in 1943.  While the Duke was commended for his composing skills, the Count was lauded as “the” bandleader of the era, nurturing the talents of such powerhouse soloists as saxophonist Lester Young (Young, or “Prez,” was “Lady Day” Billie Holiday’s favorite musician  — they gave each other those nick-names) and vocalist Jimmy Rushing.

Be-bop was pioneered in the late Forties by artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, and is considered the first kind of modern jazz.  Named by the onomatopoeic mimicking of the staccato two-tone phrase distinctive in the form, when it emerged, be-bop was rejected by not only the general public, but by many musicians as being unmusical and unlistenable.  “Cutting contests” were first seen between rival brass bands on the streets of New Orleans in the 1870s, and were popular among bop musicians.  Late into the night at after hours joints, musicians would try to play each other off the stage by creating a louder, faster, more brilliant or innovative sound.  Bop spawned  “cool”, hard bop and modal playing in the Fifties, first explored by Miles Davis.  Cool jazz derives its name from what music critics identified as an understated or subdued feeling Miles’ playing, and his 1949 ground breaking recording The Birth of the Cool.

In the Sixties, saxophonist John Coltrane combined Eastern and Western notions of improvisation, and another sax player, Ornette Coleman, began to rework the idea of collective improvisation from the early years of jazz.  Miles Davis experimented with a hybrid of jazz and rock that became “fusion” and spawned Seventies groups like Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and informed the work of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and Steely Dan.  In the Eighties and Nineties jazz came back to its roots in New Orleans as the horn-playing Marsalis Brothers and pianist Harry Connick Jr. found success with neo-traditional styles of jazz.  Today, jazz continues its tradition of change and continues to cross-pollinate: with punk, New Age, world music, rap and mainstream pop.

– Meredith Rutledge for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame

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soul (Middle English, from Old English sawol) – 1. the animating and vital principle in human beings, credited with the faculties of thought, actions and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial entity. 2. a sense of ethnic pride among African-Americans, expressed in areas such as language, social customs, religion and music.

In the mid-to-late Fifties, rhythm and blues was essentially “taken over” – re-routed from its original status as the popular music of African-Americans– to become the popular music of the whole world, with a new name: rock and roll.  Around that same time, a distinctly black music genre evolved, borrowing heavily from the music of the African-American church.  Soul music was a blending of the vocal techniques, chord progressions and call-and-response patterns of gospel, with the blues of R&B. It’s no coincidence that one of the first great voices of soul music came from the gospel world.  Sam Cooke, son of a Baptist preacher, born in the Mississippi Delta and raised in Chicago, was the first huge star of gospel music. His gospel fans were outraged when he abandoned the Soul Stirrers gospel group in 1957 to sing “the devil’s music.”  Cooke went on to become the first star of the emerging soul style.  Cooke wrote one of the first overtly political songs of the genre, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and was an entrepreneur, starting the SAR record label. SAR released records by the Soul Stirrers, Johnnie Taylor, and the Valentinos, a quintet of gospel-singing brothers named Womack from the Fairfax neighborhood of Cleveland. Lead singer Bobby Womack went solo and became a soul star in his own right.

Aretha Franklin’s style of soul is representative of the Atlantic Records sound, which ran the gamut of all the distinctive regional styles that emerged in soul’s mid-Sixties heyday. Atlantic was an early soul pioneer, starting with the genius of Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and of course, the “Queen of Soul,” Aretha Franklin.  The regional styles included gritty, earthy Memphis soul –represented by the work of artists like Al Green, Rufus Thomas, and Luther Ingram. The silky-smooth Chicago and Philadelphia sound included Chi-town’s Impressions, Jerry Butler and the Chi-Lites, and Philly’s unmatchable production team of Gamble and Huff, who brought us the Spinners, Stylistics, O’Jays and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.  Detroit soul, associated primarily with the artists of Motown Records, like the Temptations and Supremes, became “the sound of young America,” in the words of the Motown company slogan.

One primary impetus in the development of soul music was the growth of the civil rights movement.  Love and human relationships were the overriding themes of much earlier African-American music, and soul singers certainly covered that territory.  But the power, urgency and prescience of soul music developed when artists strayed from the relative safety of romance and addressed social injustice, racial pride, black militancy and protest.  Peter Guralnick, music scholar and author of Dream Boogie:The Triumph of Sam Cooke, says that the development of soul music paralleled the civil rights movement stylistically as well as chronologically, “emerging with stealth at first, slowly gathering strength, learning to assert itself without apology, then [was] forced to retrench in the face of a series of traumatic events and jarring disappointments.” As the end of the Sixties approached, soul music made way for a more militantly Afrocentric genre of black music, funk. The assassinations of our leaders, the inferno of our neighborhoods and the disillusionment brought on by failures of the civil rights movement called for a different sound, and the shape of black music was changing, yet again.

– Meredith Rutledge for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame

RELATED: The Slavery Years: 1619 – 1864

RELATED: Africa: The Genesis Of Black Music

The first Africans arrived in the English colonies at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, a  full year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The first African-Americans were not slaves, but indentured servants, required to work off passage to the New World within a specific amount of time, usually 7 years.  But, within a generation, in 1638, the first slave ship docked in Boston harbor and the American colonies were well on their way to becoming a slave society. By 1860, about 4,900,000 African-Americans lived in the United States and about 90% of those people were slaves living on plantations in the South.  And also by 1860, a uniquely African-American folk music with its own traditions had established itself in the United States.  This music was predominantly African in form, but it was also influenced by European traditions. Our people, who were stripped of property, family, and humanity when brought to the New World, held onto a piece of our homeland and identity by retaining African traditions in our music and dance.

Music was a primary form of communication for slaves, just as it had been for our African forebears.  Through songs we could comment on problems and savor the few pleasures allowed, could voice despair and hopes, assert our humanity in an environment that constantly denied our humanness.  As in the African tradition, the songs of the slaves told our history and revealed everyday concerns.  Sometimes songs were cries in the field – “cornfield hollers”  “whoops” or “water calls.”  Slave labor was the engine of America — the 19th century’s glorious promised land, with the most successful economy in the world – the engine of America was stoked with the blood, sweat, tears and songs of our people. Songs accompanied every task. Music alleviated the monotony of the work and inspired more work, even when exhausted. Music also set a rhythm to increase the efficiency and extract maximum labor from a group of workers.

In addition to work songs, spirituals were a mainstay of African-American music during the time of slavery.  In Africa, religion was a crucial part of our existence, as intrinsic and essential as breathing.  Forcibly removed from our homeland and denied our rituals of worship, African-Americans adapted to the imposed Christian religious teachings of our captors.  European psalms and hymns were melded with the songs, rituals and deities of our homeland. The Biblical stories of the Israelites’ slavery and deliverance especially resonated with the slaves. The European sacred music references to “deliverance”, to “a better world coming by and by”, to “crossing the waters of Jordan” – these were all references that could be easily applied to our thirst for freedom and those songs were often used as code communication in escape or revolt plans.

Twice a year in the South, at Christmas and at Easter, slaves were given a respite of several days to celebrate “jubilees.” Jubilees were filled with music and dancing. The music was a hybrid of songs remembered from the motherland, European psalms and hymns, and the popular songs of the day, which were usually, and ironically, songs from minstrel shows — performances by blackfaced white actors that caricatured the singing and demeanor of slaves. The dancing of slaves’ jubilees was based on African traditions mixed with the jigs and reels of European tradition. There were laws that expressly prohibited slaves from “using and keeping drums, horns or other loud instruments which may call together or give sign or notice to one another.” Drums were replaced by hand clapping, foot stomping, or “pattin’ juba” — beating hands on thighs and chest and stomping heels as accompaniment to trading tall tales and doling out humorous verbal abuse in rhymes — a direct ancestor of hip-hop’s rapping and human beat box sound effects. We would use any kind of material that could be found around the plantation to produce a musical sound: iron scraps, sheep ribs, cow or horse jawbones, hollow logs, anything that made noise.  Music was often a slaves’ only comfort in a brutal and harsh reality.  The “weariness, fear, suffering and unremitting labor” of slavery would have been unendurable without a few homemade instruments and a song to remind African-Americans of their history and humanity and to inspire faith in a future free of bondage, either on the earth, or in the “by and by.”

– Meredith Rutledge for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame

Missed Huggy Lowdown on the Tom Joyner Morning Show this morning? Well we got you covered! Check out all the jokes Huggy had today for Tom and the crew. Listen up and laugh!

Missed Huggy Lowdown on the Tom Joyner Morning Show this morning? Well we got you covered! Check out who Huggy crowned as Bamma of the Week. Listen up and laugh!

Missed Huggy Lowdown on the Tom Joyner Morning Show this morning? Well we got you covered! Check out all the jokes Huggy had today for Tom and the crew. Listen up and laugh!