Topic summary
African music
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Music of Africa.
Influence on North American music
African music has played a significant role in the shaping of what we know today as Dixieland, the blues, and jazz. These genres have all borrowed from African rhythms and sounds brought across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans. While Sub-Saharan African music is typically upbeat polyrhythms and joyful in character, the blues developed as an aesthetic response to the conditions of slavery in the Americas. The blues has likely evolved as a fusion of an African blue note scale with European twelve tone musical instruments. The musical traditions of Irish and Scottish settlers later blended with African-American musical elements, contributing to the development of old-time, bluegrass, and other similar genres.