The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens on July 25, from 7 pm until 8 pm,in conjunction with Ink, Silk, and Gold, invite you to join award-winning historian and author Sylviane Diouf as she explores the unexpected connection between Islam and the American Blues genre. For further information or to register, please call 904.899.6038 or register now.
Through images and recordings, award-winning historian Sylviane Diouf of New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, illustrates how the blues, which originated in the American South, may have evolved from the techniques of the recitation of the Qur’an and the call to prayer in West Africa.
Previously she has played two recordings: The Muslim call to prayer (the religious recitation that’s heard from mosques around the world), and “Levee Camp Holler” an early type of blues song that first sprang up in the Mississippi Delta more than 100 years ago.
“Levee Camp Holler” is no ordinary song. It’s the product of ex-slaves who worked moving earth all day in post-Civil War America. The version that Diouf uses in presentations has lyrics that, like the call to prayer, speak about a glorious God. (“Well, Lord, I woke up this mornin’, man, I feelin’ bad . . . Well, I was thinkin’ ’bout the good times, Lord, I once have had.”) But it’s the song’s melody and note changes that closely parallel one of Islam’s best-known refrains. As in the call to prayer, “Levee Camp Holler” emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter’s vocal chords. Dramatic changes in musical scales punctuate both “Levee Camp Holler” and the call to prayer. A nasal intonation is evident in both.
“I did a talk a few years ago at Harvard where I played those two things, and the room absolutely exploded in clapping, because (the connection) was obvious,” says Diouf
*From the San Francisco Chronicle