![]() ![]() At the same time, the rhythm has remained central to the sounds of modern blackness, propelling the funky soul of James Brown and Marvin Gaye, innumerable disco songs and house tracks, and the rap cadences of 50 Cent and Kendrick Lamar. 1 It becomes a go-to bluegrass flourish for the likes of Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson, and by the 1960s the figure indexes the rural past in the so-called “American Primitive” guitar of John Fahey and Leo Kottke. And indeed, it is with Atkins and Travis, rather than any black forbears, that genealogies of Scotty Moore's style tend to end. The rhythm is integral to the influential Muhlenberg County guitar style and what has become politely known as “Travis picking” (a phrase that avoids and erases its former designation as “n-r picking”). It's also the groovy hook that Chet Atkins and Merle Travis use to entrance listeners on such revealing country standards as Cannonball Rag. Mississippi John Hurt punctuates his 1928 recordings with the rhythm, while Louis Armstrong riffs on it for an entire chorus of his 1929 version of “Mahogany Hall Stomp.” Doubled up, it's the beat of the defining “doo-wop” in Duke Ellington's “It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)” (1931). Instead, it offers a distinctive, American-accented instantiation of Afrodiasporic aesthetics-one which, for all its remarkable presence across myriad genres and eras, has received little attention as an African-American “rhythmic key” that has proven utterly essential to the history of American popular music, not least for the sound and story of country.Įmployed by countless ragtime string bands, this figure carries forward into jazz orchestration and improvisation in the 1920s and into the repertory of country ragtime, blues, and folk musicians. Notably, this particular figure, which could be counted as 2+3+3+3+3+2, is exceedingly rare in the Caribbean compared to variations on its triple-duple cousins, such as the Cuban son clave (3+3+4+2+4) or the “double tresillo” (3+3+3+3+4). Coming to prominence via Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag (1899) and other best-sellers of the era, the rhythm in question is not the well-known “cakewalk” or tresillo 3+3+2 polyrhythm, also prevalent in ragtime. While seeming by the mid-50s to issue from different cultural universes mapping neatly onto Jim Crow apartheid, their parallel polyrhythms point to a revealing common root: ragtime. Ironically, the horn hits that mark Charles's “I Got a Woman” as a jump blues with deep ties to big band jazz accent the very same beats that, in Elvis's “Mystery Train,” articulated on a twangy guitar by Scotty Moore, could be heard as bringing the hillbilly to the rock 'n' roll party. Both would soon be hailed as rock 'n' roll stars, but today the two songs would likely be described as quintessential examples, respectively, of rockabilly and soul. In 1955, Elvis Presley and Ray Charles each stormed the pop charts with songs employing the same propulsive rhythm. Tracing this particular rhythm reveals how musical figures once clearly heard and marketed as African-American inventions have been absorbed by, foregrounded in, and whitened by country music while they persist in myriad forms of black music in the century since ragtime reigned. Instead, it offers a distinctive, U.S.-based instantiation of Afrodiasporic aesthetics-one which, for all its remarkable presence across myriad music scenes and eras, has received little attention as an African-American “rhythmic key” that has proven utterly key to the history of American popular music, not least for the sound and story of country. Coming to prominence via Maple Leaf Rag (1899) and other ragtime best-sellers, the rhythm in question is exceedingly rare in the Caribbean compared to variations on its triple-duple cousins, such as the Cuban clave. ![]() ![]()
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