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Well, because it's not true. Morrison is incorrect.
Sure, the blues is a new world music and a melting pot music -- it was the invention of African Americans in the new world and possibly didn't even coaelesce in the form with think of it as today until the earliest years of the 20th century, although though it had predecessors in music going back to the colonial era of slavery -- the ring shouts and the corn husking songs and the work songs.
While those antecedents were not entirely immune from the influence of Anglo and European music in the new world -- the slave population heard Anglican hymns, local white vernacular music, the best musicians played the dances for the white folks, learning their music and styles -- they hae explicit and direct connection to West African traditions -- the modal and antiphonal stuctures, the partially flatten thirds and sevenths, the rhythmically floating leads over a ground beat, etc.
There are musical similarities between some of the Africanisms that survived in African American music from the 1600s on down and traditional Irish music. Partially flatted third, fifths and sevenths show up in traditional Irish music, for example, just as crucially as the to in African American music. But Irish music isn't the source for them in African American music. They existed in African American music from the time Africans were forceably brought to the Americas, and long before the big Irish influx to the new world. And of course antiphonal structures appear in all kinds of folk music of a wide variety of cultures --European music again isn't the source for that structure in African American music; that's just kind of a universal aspect found in music.
But the Anglican hymns and spirituals that Morrison is citing here don't have the modal melodies, the partially flatted notes, the irregular rhythm structures of blues as it developed in Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They're not the source of blues even if they may be an input music. In what ways does "Abide with Me" seem like Handy's "Yellow Dog Blues" or even Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night"? (Of course I know Abide with Me is not an old traditional song and only goes back to mid 19th century, but harmonically, structurally, with its underlying William Henry Monk music, it's pure English spiritual.)
There's also other European music that has the mournful, modal quality of the blues, like flamenco, but that's a music that bears a strong African influence -- both a North African influence on its in situ development in Andalusia, and a new world African influence via African slaves held by Spanish owners and the writing in the 16th century of "negrazillas" and "zarambesques" that were deliberate adoptings of African notions into flamenco styles. So the African influence on European music is part of this story too.
You gotta remember the Atlantic slave trade began in the 1520s, and yes it began in Portugal, so Morrison's citing of Portugal as a place were this kind of cultural exchange accelerated is correct. From that point forward the transmission of musical influence in both directions -- from African to European and from European to African -- began. So who influenced who and how and when can be tricky to unwind.
Blues as a specific musical form doesn't show up in any recognizable way in the historical record until around 1900, though it probably had to predate that, and obviously had predecessor musics in the ring shouts and corn husking songs and work songs, and folkloric dance music -- and there's plenty of writing about what African music sounded like in the new world going back to the 1600s. Dana Epstein's Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War, is a pretty good survey of the early writings about and attempts to catalogue what that music sounded like. By the time blues develops in the US, 350 years after Africans are forceably bought to North America, there's a whole distinct tradition of African American music peculiar to the African American population (and remember while in the Carribbean, on sugar plantations, slaves were often worked to death, and new slaves continually brought in from Africa, with the West African musical styles staying very much close to the surface of musics like rumba and the music and religious tradition of something like Santaria; in North America the slave population largely grew by birth, and by the days of the early republic African Americans were a very distinct population whose families had been on the continent for generations and who had a distinct culture that was neither African nor European but was American). So, while there's no doubt European influences to be found in African American music circa 1900. I think the attempt to claim a European wellspring for the blues, as THE source of blues, is barking up the wrong tree -- both an over simplification and possibly reflective of some kind of need white, European singers of the blues might feel to prove some kind of bona fides in singing blues.
This post strikes me as the rankest sort of Cultural Marxist hairsplitting, deconstructing ideas down to the point where they no longer have any meaning. This argument insists on the primacy of the African musical “tradition” where there really wasn’t one. One of the aspects of the African psyche that struck the early European explorers and missionaries is how little concept the Africans had of the past, of any traditions handed down in their "culture". They lived solely in the moment, no past, no future. They didn't have the word "why" in their vocabulary. That's not hard to understand when you realize they had IQs of 60 or 70. And the early slaves were no different. I find it hard to believe that any slave living in the American South after one or two generations had any cultural memory of any musical traditions of their ancestors.
I would argue that the atonality concepts of “artists” such as Arnold Schoenberg and Joseph Marx, which came after the blues were projected onto the history of Black musical traditions to give them a theoretical legitimacy that they don't have
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