African folk music is as diverse as the landscape and peoples of that vast continent. However, like its European cousin with its triple time rhythms, African folk music also shares some common traits. Firstly, it tends to be circular and repetitive in form rather than linear and progressive, and usually avoids leading tones. Often it has a 'heterophonic' structure - i.e. several different versions of the same melody are sung at the same time. It tends to express a communal way of life, and the main singer is a mouthpiece for his people rather than an individual wishing to express a personal identity. Quite often he or she will lead the people in a 'call and response' routine.
So when the Atlantic slave trade got underway, beginning as early as the 16th century, these musical forms and traditions were naturally transported with the captive peoples and transplanted from west and central African into the New World, eventually becoming a familiar sound in the fields and prison camps of the Old South.

In parts of West Africa, most notably in what is today Mali, Senegal and The Gambia, there were (and still are) individuals known as griots, the African equivalent of the travelling minstrel or troubadour, who moved from village to village telling jokes and stories, playing music, and giving out advice and wisdom. Often the griot carried a 'khalam' or a 'banjar', cruder versions of the modern banjo, and was regarded as a holy figure because of his or her special talent to play songs that could make you laugh or cry, to recite ancient stories, arbitrate, and generally act as a conduit for an unseen spiritual power.
During the long years of the forced migration a large number of griots are thought to have been brought over into the Americas, but instead of singing the old village songs, they now also sang songs that expressed their fear, sadness and homesickness in this unfamiliar new land. These old songs and field hollers, modified as they passed through generations, became the basis of a new North American black music.

Invevitably over time there was a cross-fertilisation with European musical styles - hymns, folk ballads and military marches for example - which introduced new harmonic and rhythmic structures, most notably the strict tempo of march time. Out of this mixing came new hybrids such as spirituals, ragtime and probably the most important single musical style in the development of modern popular music, the blues.

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