In America, in all its permutations, is subjected to a socio-
anthropological as well as musical scrutiny, something about
the essential nature of the Negro's existence in this country
ought to be revealed, as well as something about the essen-
tial nature of this country, i.e., society as a whole.

Blues, had, and still has, a certain weight in the psyches
of its inventors. What I am proposing is that the alteration
or repositioning of this weight in those same psyches indi-
cates changes in the Negro that are manifested externally. I
am proposing that the weight of the blues for the slave, the
completely disenfranchised individual, differs radically from
the weight of that same music in the psyches of most con-
temporary American Negroes. I mean, we know certain
definite things about the lives of the Negro slaves. We also,
with even more certainty, know things about the lives of the
contemporary American Negroes. The one peculiar referent
to the drastic change in the Negro from slavery to "citizen-
ship" is his music.

There are definite stages in the Negro's transmutation
from African to American: or, at least, there are certain
very apparent changes in the Negro's reactions to America from the time of his first importation as slave until the pres-
ent that can, I think, be seen -- and again, I insist that these
changes are most graphic in his music. I have tried to scru-
tinize each one of these stages as closely as I could, with a
musical as well as a sociological and anthropological em-
phasis.

If we take 1619, twelve years after the settling of James-
town in 1607, as the date of the first importation of Negroes
into this country to stay (not to be merely brought here for
a time to do odd jobs, etc., and then be bumped off, as was
very often the case), we have a good point in history to
move from. First, we know that West Africans, who are the
peoples most modern scholarship has cited as contributing
almost 85 per cent of the slaves finally brought to the United

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