Kenneth R. said:
How can slaves who hardly knew English at all
The blues developed from earlier hybrid forms in the latter part of the 19th century, long, long after the servile population had become English-speaking. Even in the early 19th century, when the earliest forms of the slave music in America were developing, the servile population was predominately native to the US and largely English speaking. By the point at which new musical forms began to emerge, most slaves were had been in America for 2-4 generations.
hated their masters and their oppression, decide to adopt their folk music?
Since when has that
ever stopped artistic transmission? The history of artistic interchange between oppressed and oppressor is long and well-documented.
This is again, absurd. The only European influence on the early Blues and Jazz music was that of naming and quantizing notes, and tabulating it into written mediums.
Horseshit, the blues were played very early on by white as well as black musicians, and heavily influenced by white folk music before it. Jazz likewise (see:
Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945)
This and the providing of actual instrument standards such as the violin, the piano, etc, which were European inventions.
Nevermind that even the most extreme tonal developments in jazz were anticipated by European composers like Stravinsky etc. Or using Western instruments to play in non-Western tonal systems is impossible (which is why you can't, say, use a guitar to play microtonal music in the Chinese tradition). The fact that the blues was always played on Western instruments is proof in and of itself of the Western origins of its tonal system (as if the common usage of pentatonic scales in British folk music and early American songs wasn't proof enough).
If this is not the case, then explain how rock and metal of all forms did not develop until after this explosion? If metal is based on European folk music, why did it not develop before these others, and sooner? Why... because you're wrong.
You haven't been paying attention. The blues itself developed out of hybridized form of simplified European tonal systems and simplified African rhythmic patterns. As I said earlier, this provided a formalized base for improvisation. The progressions, structures and basic rhythmic patterns are locked in place, allowing for easy improvisation, both vocally and for solo instruments.
Jazz and rock both represent attempts to take the basic system of the blues and broaden its expressive possibilities, jazz by incorporating more complex rhythms and the tonal experimentation pioneered by Modernist classical music, and rock by incorporating elements of jazz (white crooner styles and black r&b) and country music. Metal grew out of the impulse to break free of the blues/jazz/rock tradition of popular music entirely (as did ambient music, which emerged at approximately the same time), and it did so by moving away from recursive structures based on verse/chorus and towards a narrative format emphasizing the evolutionary iteration of themes (in essence, returning to the structural precepts of classical music) and toward and emphasis on the melodic rather than rhythmic possibilities of music. Obviously, this wasn't an overnight process, but it culminated in the extreme metal of the early 1990s, by far metal's most creatively important era.
