The perhaps inelegant title of this paper reflects my initial feeling of distaste when it was suggested that I read another paper indicating the importance of the African cultural background for certain present-day characteristics of the music and the folklore of the American Negro. By now, no one conversant with the literature and the subject matter doubts that the position assumed by Sir Harry Johnson and championed by Melville Herskovits is essentially right. This was, briefly, the position that West African slaves brought with them to the New World a distinctive style of music and a musical value system that continued to develop (while absorbing new elements) in the foreign surroundings. My own contributions to the controversy consisted in pointing out that since there was little reason, in terms of pressure from the rest of American culture, to change many diagnostic elements of the West African musical style, it changed only through the incorporation of new musical elements that could be reinterpreted to fit it, and further, in indicating the kinds of musical norms from West Africa that have persisted in the New World, in somewhat specific terms. This of course, refers to the slave period. Later on, the controversy was mainly about the Spirituals and Gospel Hymns. Even in early postbellum times claims frequently were made to the effect that the Negroes of the United States had contributed these beautiful melodies and harmonies to the world. This seems almost to have been taken for granted, and not only by the Freedmen's Bureau, since some talent in singing and dancing among American Negroes had been recognized consistently by slaveholders and other opponents of abolition. Then, early in the twentieth century, Wallaschek's volume Primitive Music (1893) appeared, with the allegation that all the beautiful Negro songs were in reality simply copies, and somewhat inept copies, of European tunes. Shortly thereafter, Henry Krehbiel (1914) reasserted the autonomy of American Negro songs. However, fourteen years later, Newman Ivy White (1928) once again brought forth the claim that American Negro songs were copies of white tunes, and George Pullen Jackson, in his White Spirituals of the Southern Uplands (1933) devoted two chapters to disposing of any claims American Negroes might have to originality, either in words or in music, in their Spirituals. If the controversy has indeed ended, as I have mentioned, with an appreciation of the importance of the contribution of West African musical patterns to those musics that are identified mainly with the Negro of the United States, the question, What went wrong, might legitimately be asked. The answer is a complex one. First, it might be noted that in most of the squabbling about Negro capacity for musical creativeness, the alternatives seem to have been posed as follows: Either the Negro slaves and their descendants copied the songs that were all around them, or (perhaps by virtue of a truly remarkable racial musical talent) they invented them out of nothing in order to express the emotions proper to slaves and depressed peoples. According to this