Across The Color Line:
The African South
Music has always been one of the realms in American life where the barrier of the color line has never been very effective. The Africanizing of American traditional and popular music weren’t limited to Blues, Gospel, or Jazz. The old-time fiddle and banjo music of the South shows distinctly African musical retentions brought into the music by Black musicians who shared this musical tradition with Whites. This could only have happened in the South where people of African and European descent have lived intimately, if uneasily for three and a half centuries.
In this varied program featuring the calabash gourd banjo, diddley bow, fiddle and guitar, Scott Ainslie tours the music of the American South where European and African musical traditions cross-pollinated to make the powerful hybrids that have long dominated popular music in our nation and, subsequently, in the world.
After learning old-time music first hand from such legendary players as North Carolina’s Tommy Jarrell, and from the Hammons family in the high country of West Virginia, Ainslie spent fifteen years as an old-time fiddler and banjo player, touring and recording with the award-winning Fly By Night String Band and working on Broadway in the early 1980s.
Picking up the banjo and fiddle – instruments he laid down to concentrate on Blues twenty-five years ago – Scott Ainslie brings his broad musical and scholarly expertise forward in a program that profiles the broad impact of African musical and cultural traditions found in Old-time mountain music, Blues and Gospel music in the South. Suitable for all ages, this is a tour-de-force in Southern musical traditions that exposes their roots in the fiddle tunes of the Scots-Irish and the musical traditions of West Africa.