This is an excellent profile, and so relevant to an ongoing conversation between me & my wife about art and influence: Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means | The New Yorker
...many different folk-music traditions tend to contain a particular kind of melody or set of notes, "neutral intervals," between major and minor. In America, we call them "blue notes" - flatted thirds and sevenths and fifths. They can suggest moaning and dissonance. The cord that binds the various global sub-styles of folk in which these notes occur is what the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax termed the "Old High Culture" of Eurasia, which stretched back to Mesopotamia. Strangely, perhaps, given that we are talking about twentieth-century popular music, it was often Islamic song traditions that acted as the conveyor for these deep strains in world music. Van der Merwe shows how the "gliding chromaticism" characteristic of the blues spread via Islamic influence into West Africa (in particular the Senegambia region) and, via Spain, into Ireland and the "Celtic fringe." From those places, these styles and sounds rode farther west, to North America, on slave ships and immigrant ships. In the American South, the Celtic and the African musical traditions met. It was an odd family reunion. Each culture had its own songs, but the idioms understood one another. The result was American music.
Plus Rhiannon Giddens is pretty damn talented.
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Originally Posted by Dallas Tex
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