The Earliest Sources of Folk Music from Africa

Abstract

It may come as a shock to students of folk music to discover that in Africa no collection of folk song, either in print or as recorded sound, antedates the beginning of this century. In 1900 South African musicians performed for 0. Abraham in Berlin.' Most likely, this is the first recording of music from the dark continent that found its way into archives. Three years later Meinhof in East Africa and Treager in Tunisia collected African material on cylinders. These were the first well-documented field recordings that became available to scholars, although it is certain that even before that date African performances had been phonographed in Africa.2 From the first decade of the century came ten collections of cylinders, the earliest that were much utilized in the literature of later years. Although many cylinders were lost, and the survivors in any case were accessible only in a few archives, knowledge of their contents spread widely. This was a good beginning, but it is an unpleasant truth that we had to wait until the end of the second World War for a new and better type of field collecting that amounted to a major break-through in the search for musical sources. I am thinking here of the coherent, long performances recorded by G. ROUGET3 in West-Africa instead of the extracts that are commonly published on disc and tape even today -, and H. TRACEY'S4 survey of music in Africa on discs.