Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "African blues" in English language version.
From obscure and largely undocumented rural American origins, it became the most extensively recorded of all traditional music types... Since the early 1960s blues has been the most important single influence on the development of Western popular music... In its early years the blues was wholly African American... Influential in its development were the collective unaccompanied work-songs of the plantation culture, which followed a responsorial 'leader-and-chorus' form that can be traced not only to pre-Civil War origins but to African sources. Responsorial work-songs diminished when the plantations were broken up, but persisted in the southern penitentiary farms until the 1950s. After the Reconstruction era, black workers either engaged in seasonal collective labour in the South or tended smallholdings leased to them under the system of debt-serfdom known as sharecropping. Work-songs therefore increasingly took the form of solo calls or 'hollers', comparatively free in form but close to blues in feeling. The vocal style of the blues probably derived from the holler... Blues instrumental style shows tenuous links with African music. Drumming was forbidden on slave plantations, but the playing of string instruments was often permitted and even encouraged, so the musicians among slaves from the savanna regions, with their strong traditions of string playing, predominated. The jelli, or griots – professional musicians who also acted as their tribe's historians and social commentators – performed roles not unlike those of the later blues singers, while the banjo is thought to be a direct descendant of their banza or xalam.(subscription required)
