Predicting black musical innovation and integration: the 1850 Mance Index for Appalachia.

Imagine, if you will, that you are an open-minded musical enthusiast whose only exposure has been to the classical European tradition, with no knowledge of North American music of the last century or before. You are suddenly exposed to the music of, say, Bessie Smith and Josh White (to name just two diverse African-American performers with Appalachian backgrounds).

Among the first shocks would be to find that these individuals are clearly working to different standards and modes of performance than their European counterparts. For example, there is an emphasis on rhythmic complexity and syncopation that is largely foreign to European notions, while the European attention to melody development and scalar range is largely absent.

Bessie Smith and Josh White are at the same time typical and atypical of African-American performance in the Appalachian context. They are typical in that a number of performers work or worked in similar styles. They are atypical in being recognized as superior in their respective fields.

Even white North American music, whether "serious" or otherwise, has departed from standards and modes so central to European thought. Those standards and modes had been so dominant in the European mind that they had once been assumed to apply universally.

Why has North American music been so different? Much can be explained by an interaction between the European habits brought by the white settlers and African practices retained, by permission or otherwise, by the slaves brought across the Atlantic. The introduced European music had considerable variety. There were the hymns, dirges, and fugues associated with the church, there was folksong from all parts of the British Isles and any number of parallel continental traditions, and there was the art music, developed over several centuries, by the finest minds working in the "classical" traditions of European music.