West Africa

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The Atlantic-facing region running from Senegambia around the Gulf of Guinea, together with the Sahelian belt inland, from which the majority of people embarked in the transatlantic trade were taken and from which the instrument families and rhythmic practices in this Journey derive. It is not a single musical culture and treating it as one is the commonest error in writing about this subject. Its interior savannah and Sahel — Wolof, Fulbe, Mande, Songhai and Hausa societies — carry the plucked-lute and hereditary-musician traditions, long-standing Islamic contact through the trans-Saharan routes, and a solo, ornamented, melismatic vocal style. Its forest and coastal zones — Akan, Ewe, Yoruba, Igbo and others — carry the densest drum-ensemble and polyrhythmic practice and a strongly collective, call-and-response singing. Gerhard Kubik's argument that the blues descends principally from the west-central Sudanic belt rather than from the coast turns entirely on that internal difference: it predicts a solo string-accompanied tradition with wavy intonation and no percussion, which is what rural Delta blues looks like, and which the coastal drum traditions do not predict.