February 8, 2006
Musician notes history of American music
Ray Kamalay covers roots of music as part of Live at the Library series celebrating Black History Month
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
A professional musician for more than three decades, Ray Kamalay is a devoted student of the roots of American music.
The East Lansing resident is the guitarist, singer and bandleader for Ray Kamalay and His Red Hot Peppers, a small jazz band steeped in American tradition. He was in town last Thursday more to talk than sing, though sing he did, when he presented a lecture on the roots of American popular music at the Traverse Area District Library.
The gig was part of the library's Live! At the Library series and a special presentation in honor of Black History Month. The event drew 35 attendees for the hour-long program, which featured a detailed lecture and wound up with a few tunes, including a Scott Joplin ragtime song and a 150-year-old minstrel piece.
Kamalay has concluded, after years of extensive research, that spiritual songs sung by American slaves in the rural South before the Civil War are the source of jazz and blues music. The Chicago or other big city style of blues and jazz widely known today, which is not spiritual, was not heard until after World War II.
"As a musician I see the strong connection between African-American music and jazz, all the forms build together," said Kamalay. "I really believe the blues began contemporaneously with the spirituals. That the earliest blues were about slavery but there was no outlet for it."
Anchoring the foundation for his thesis in ancient Roman and Greek models of slavery and citizenship, Kamalay guided listeners on a fast-paced tour of the history of slavery in the world. He touched on slave-owning cultures in China, India, Africa and Native American tribes in North America. He defined key terms - bondage, contraband, liberty, serfdom and slavery - and described how different societies applied these concepts.
"The plantation system we had in the United States is a direct descendent of the Roman system," said Kamalay. "After Rome fell, local leaders took over and that became serfdom; there was no slavery in Europe except in the Iberian Peninsula."
Spanish and Portuguese settlement of the New World beginning in the 15th Century brought a brutal form of slavery to South and Central America. There, relatively close to the slave forts on the West African coast, slaves were considered a disposable resource to be purchased, worked and starved to death and then replaced.
"The average slave lived only about a year," Kamalay said, adding that slaves were cut off from their language, homeland, culture and not allowed to create a new one. "The idea in slavery was domination to keep the person weak and doing what you wanted them to do."
In America, settled by non-slave-owning Europeans whom Kamalay believed felt a fundamental guilt at the practice, slavery took a different shape. The longer trip to the North America coast made slaves more valuable while ample fertile land made feeding them economical. Families were allowed to form, children were born and a social structure and culture began to take shape among slaves.
"America was the only place where they reproduced faster than they died," Kamalay noted.
In the United States, the slaves learned their master's language, which opened avenues of escape. About ten percent of early slaves were allowed to practice Christianity; they spread it to others and the religion gained a distinctive African influence. Music and song expressed the slaves shared experience, yearnings and struggles.
The white and black cultures did not interact before the Civil War and blacks were not allowed on stage because of contraband laws. African-American music began to take root among a popular audience after slavery ended. Minstrel shows, which originally were folk festivals of song and dance, became popular. Kamalay described the evolution of these shows into black-face variety shows, which became a convention of American stage and formed a foundation to vaudeville.
"Minstrel shows weren't just a mockery of the Negro, they became a stylized form of entertainment that made fun of black people and made fun of white people," he said.
African-American spirituals also came into public awareness in the 1870s and became wildly popular. The music was first performed during fund-raisers to raise money for colleges for blacks, to be built on land donated for this purpose.
"Nobody had ever heard this material," Kamalay said.