Music's Ability to Shape People and Culture

Music's Ability to Shape People and Culture

The lights blind me. I shake as the sweat pours from my head while everybody stares at me, judging me, and listening to me. The monitors in front of me hiss and explode with vibrations, the rhythm section is pulling behind me, and the room is packed to the brink. There is smoke in the air along with the ecstasy that seems to electrify the room and feed my creativity. I am not just playing music; I am creating it and living it. It's what I love to do the most and it is what I do for a living. Yet every Monday through Friday, people across America wake up early and go to work from nine to five. They take their short lunch breaks, have meetings, sit at their computers, hand in their reports, and do whatever it is the millions of Americans do. At the end of the week the American population at least has the weekend. The coveted Friday night, Saturday and Sunday give people a chance to relax and unwind after five days of hard work. In some religions, it is even a requirement to take at least one day a week for trust and reflection. Stress is lost, sleep is gained and people really enjoy losing themselves in a movie or dancing the night away at a club. Although everybody likes to relax and have fun, one thing seems to universally dominate the entertainment and nightlife of America and the obsession is music. Music in general is an everyday word that is thrown around from the latest pop album to greatly refined classical music, yet everybody craves it. Historians have gone as far as calling this era the ipod generation because of the ever-growing convenience and demand for obtaining music. Moreover, music's influence on people is growing by leaps and bounds. Nevertheless, music is not a new phenomenon and people have been playing, writing, and listening to it sense humans have existed. We all use it to relive stress, forget ourselves for a moment, and even improve our lives. The sound of music alone has crushed empires and brought peace to nations so it is only natural that it also stimulates culture. African Americans in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and earlier twentieth century used music for everything from creating identities, reliving the day's stress, and even for secret codes. Music changed there lives for the better and has also unquestionably changed mine for the better as well.

The worm climate, boundless fields of fertile soil, long growing seasons, and numerous creeks and rivers provided great conditions for farming plantations in the South. However, if you were an African American slave who worked in the fields things looked radically different. The hot sun beat down on your sweaty body for long hours during an even longer planting season, with muddy water at your feet and worst of all, you probably worked alone. Not only did slaves work apart from others on the field, but far apart from their families as well. Because the productivity of the plantations depended on the slaves, only the best were bought and families were split from anywhere from one farm over, to four states over. "Slave families were extremely vulnerable to separation. As a result of the sale or death of a father or mother, over a third of all slave children grew up in households from which one or both parents were absent. About a quarter of all slave children grew up in a single-parent household (nearly always with their mother) and another tenth grew up apart from both parents." (www.digitalhistory.com) When people are exposed to these types of conditions for long periods of time, the need to expel unpleasant emotions and communicate becomes overwhelming which led to slaves using the only thing they could to use: there voices. Long chants across cotton fields and cornfields could be heard thought the strenuous day and it make sure you know who as talking to whom, many slaves used different pitches. Over-articulation and long, drawn out phrases was the only way to shout or sing so the other person could understand what the message was about. (www.imdb.com) If we were to stand in the hot fields of the south on any given day, we would certainly hear beautiful long rhythms and even harmonies about anything from how hungry someone was, to how tired someone might be, to even a beautiful girl that might have been spotted. But most likely you were to hear a chant in time the hoe hitting the ground or a hatchet chopping some wood. This rhythm made the exhausting and mundane work seem less unpleasant. On the infrequent days that the slaves might not have to work, spending time with friends and slaves might not have to work; spending time with friends and fellow workers was certainly the most important priority. Random instruments such as a wash bin with a string, or an old ale jug were used to keep rhythm wile people would sing away there stress and worries. This new from of music called "nigger noise" would soon be known as the blues. "The blues... its 12-bar, bent note melody is the anthem of a race, bonding itself together with cries of shared self victimization. Bad luck an d trouble are always present in the Blues, and always the result of others, pressing upon unfortunate and down trodden poor souls, yearning to be free from life's troubles and trepidations. Relentless rhythms repeat the chants of sorrow, and the pity of a lost soul many times over. This is the Blues." -W.C. Handy ( www.music-rock-h.com) There were soon, all kinds of different instruments that accompanied the slave music. There were still all the field hollers, moans, and shouts, yet they also made use of homemade instruments from the banjo and tambourine, to washboards, pots, and spoons. The one thing the African Americans could not use by law, was a set of real drums, which was one of the common threads that bound there old culture together. Thus, many states had banned the use of drums in fear that Africans would use them to create some form of a system of communication in order to strike back against the Americans. Nonetheless, the blacks managed to generate percussion and percussive sounds, using other instruments or even on their own bodies. The way that the slaves used this new form of music just goes to show how no matter what or how much you try to oppress people, people will find a way to grow stronger. The blues helped the African American culture survive and sculpted an entire generation of new music that would soon be known as jazz.

For the longest time I can remember I have always loved music. I would always listen to it on the radio or listen to what my sister played on her tape player growing up. It is also a fact that all people remember certain parts of their lives when monumental event happen. For instance, I can tell every detail