![]() ![]() Benjamin Latrobe, the noted architect, witnessed one of these collective dances on February 21, 1819, and not only On roughly the same ground-and there are perhaps no more intriguing documents in the history of African-American music. Scattered firsthand accounts provide us with tantalizing details of these slave dances that took place in the open area then known as Congo Square-today Louis Armstrong Park stands In fact, it is nineteenth-century New Orleans. A number of women in the group begin chanting. Moving in time to the pulsations of the music, some swaying gently, others aggressively stomping their feet. ![]() A dense crowd of dark bodies forms into circular groups-perhaps five or six hundred individuals That appears, on the one hand, informal and spontaneous yet, on closer inspection, ritualized and precise. A dance of seeming contradictions accompanies this musical give-and-take, a moving hieroglyph Another calabash has been made into a drum, and a woman heats at it with two short sticks. A third black man, seated on the ground, plucks at a string instrument, the body of which is roughly fashionedįrom a calabash. A second drummer, holding his instrument between his knees, joins in, playing with the same staccato attack. Using his fingers and the edge of his hand, he jabs repeatedly at the drum head-which is around a foot in diameter and probably made from an animal skin-evoking a throbbing pulsation with rapid, An elderly black man sits astride a large cylindrical drum.
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