Colonial prohibition of drumming

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 13 related

1. Story
2. The legal suppression of African drumming across much of the English-speaking Americas, and one of the clearest cases in this Journey of law shaping sound. After the Stono Rebellion of 9 September 1739, in which a group of enslaved people led by a man named Jemmy marched from the Stono river with drums and banners, the South Carolina assembly passed a comprehensive slave code on 10 May 1740 — the Negro Act — which among many other restrictions barred enslaved people from assembling and from using drums, horns and other loud instruments. The stated reasoning was that drums were a signalling technology capable of assembling people across distance, which is accurate: that is one of the things a West African ensemble drum does. Comparable prohibitions spread through other British mainland colonies. The musical consequence is structural rather than incidental. Where drums were banned, the ensemble's timeline and interlock had to be rebuilt on whatever was legal — clapping, stamping, the body, a stringed instrument, a voice — and traditions that grew up under prohibition are string-led and percussion-poor in exactly the way the drum-permitting Catholic colonies of Cuba and Brazil are not.
3. Knowledge
4. Colonial prohibition of drumming
5. The Stono Rebellion
6. Connections
7. The West African drum ensemble
8. The Stono Rebellion
9. Blues
10. The Stono Rebellion
11. The South Carolina Negro Act prohibits drums
12. New Orleans confines Sunday gatherings to Congo Square
13. Colonial prohibition of drumming
14. Colonial prohibition of drumming
15. The West African drum ensemble
16. Evidence
17. The Act restricted assembly, movement, earning and literacy among enslaved people and barred the use of drums, horns and other loud instruments, the colonial authorities holding that drums functioned as a means of assembly and signalling. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary from encyclopaedic and museum accounts; the statute text was not read, and no section or clause number is cited.
18. Kubik traces the blues principally to the west-central Sudanic belt rather than to the West African coast, identifying an "ancient Negritic" and an Islamic strand, and characterising rural Deep South blues as solo, string-accompanied, percussion-free, pentatonic and marked by wavy intonation. V55 verification basis: the book is cited as the standing authority and is named in the Journey's own declared references; it was NOT read in this session, and the account of its argument comes from retrieved summaries and reviews.