authentic American music

"Negro melody has been called the only autochthonous music of the American continent. The inner soul of the red man is not preserved to us in song. The European brought his folk-thought and folk-song acquired by his ancestors in unremembered ages. It was reserved for the transplanted African to sing a new song racy of the soil, which has been baptized with his blood and watered with his tears. This music is the spontaneous expression of the race soul under new and depressing environment. It is the folk genius of the African, not indeed on his ancestral heath, but in a new though beloved land. Unlike the captive Jew, who, under like circumstances, hung his harp upon the willow and sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept, the transplanted African made a contribution to the repertoire of song which moistens the eye and melts the heart of the world. These songs are not African, but American. The scene, circumstances, and aspirations are not adapted to some distant continent, but to their new environment in a land, not of their sojourn, but of their abiding place...

"There is a disposition on the part of the more sensitive members of the colored race to affect to feel ashamed of these melodies which solaced and sustained their ancestors under burdens as grievous as any the human race has ever been called upon to bear. They fear to acknowledge a noble influence because it proceeded from a lowly place... A race that is ashamed itself or of its historic humiliation which has been overcome, makes a pitiable spectacle in the eyes of the world to which it appeals for sympathy and tolerance. A people afraid of their own shadow must forever abide in the shade..."

P.236-238, Race Adjustment: essays on the Negro in America, "Artistic gifts of the Negro," by Kelly Miller (1909)