Unit 4 Summary

As we've witnessed throughout this unit, post-Reconstruction America caused for further development of the African American expression as a response to the era's socio-political plight. Through peonage, the work songs led to the advancement of the blues, and rightly so, considering the lives that were abruptly altered in order to retain free labor in the American South. On the other hand, the blues became popularized particularly among female performers, such as Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others.

As a salient reminder and as stated in the introduction, one must credit the catharsis of the ring shout as the primary source in which all Black musical and cultural expressions are rooted. For indeed, it was from an oppressed people that a manifestation of rhythm, body movement, and song emerged that possessed the power to transcend the vicissitudes of the slave experience in America.

With the church at the center of the Black community, the idiom of gospel music began in the late nineteenth and twentieth century with the hymns of Charles Albert Tindley. The gospel genre becomes crystalized in the 1930s by former blues pianist Thomas A. Dorsey.

Within the secular genres, we find the work songs and the blues, from victims of an ill-fated system of peonage, become essential elements in the birth of a new genre. Jazz is said to be the first among African American genres untainted by the chains and shackles of slavery. "Freedom" music, as many call it. It is through this genre and cultural movement that African Americans claimed an identity all their own. The Black Renaissance in America began in Washington, DC with the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1898), the writings of Alaine Locke (1912), and certainly, in the music of Duke Ellington, who ushed the movement to Harlem (1927).