The Melugeon Connection:
Did Country and Western Music Originate in Africa?
An Indigenous Mulungeon family. Who are these people?
No sir, I haven't flipped my wig. Country music, the long standing music of choice for red necks, Klan members and anti-segregationists may have partial origins in the folkways of African music. Now just calm down there pal, and hear me out!
I'm currently working on a small research paper for the Gates Foundation to submit as part of a larger project on the ethno-cultural origins of traditional country and western music and I've found what appears to be an African connection at the root of country music. None of this is news to anthropologists specialize in Appalachian subcultures but the African connection to the Appalachian musical folkways has gone unnoticed by prominent American music historians (which I am not one of).
Most music historians agree that traditional country music as sung by Roy Acuff, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers originates within the musical folkways of Appalachia and leave it at that. Both Alan Lomax and Harry Smith (who were prominent music historians) correctly connected the origin of traditional country music to the folkways of Appalachian culture. Lomax and Smith comment extensively on the Scotch-Irish, welsh, English immigrant influence upon the music of Appalachia, but beyond the Celtic influence both historians ignore the influence of a second cultural group, the Melungeons (aka Melungian).
The region of Appalachia is at the tri-cornered region of three states: Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. The Melungeons are unique native American group of unknown origins who exist only in the Applicant region. Melungeons are technically Native American but not in the sense that most Americans understand "Indians" to be Native Americans. Melungeons have origins in a different region of the globe and have no resemblance of the members of the American Indian tribal nation.
Melungeons may have originated in the sub-Saharan region of Africa but since Melungeons were living in America when the colonists arrived, the mystery is how did they get here?
Descriptions of Melungeons vary widely from observer to observer, from "Middle Eastern" to "Native American" to "light-skinned African American."
There has been a heated debate among anthropologists about exactly who these Melungeons really are. A small minority of athropologist deny the exsistence of a culturally distinct group of Melungeon people and most of those people got their antropology degree from a Christian fundamentalist institution of higher learning, where scholars are taught to be racially color blind (
racially color blind as defined by a policy of "close your eyes and all those uppity racial minorities will go away).
Fortunately I'm not an anthropologist so I don't have any political stake on the racial or ethnic classification of Melungeons. From pictures they look like gypsies who are a nomadic people with origins in the Arabic culture of North Africa and then migrated to Bohemian, Romanian and Carpathian regions of Eastern Europe and regions of Spain, Southern France.
So who are Melugeons and what does "Melungeon music" sound like? The word Melungeon means many things to many people. To the Arabic it means "Cursed Soul." To the French it means " Mixed." To the Scottish and Irish immigrants to the Appalachian Mountains, it meant not quite white.
Nobody really knows what authentic Melungeon music really sounds or may have sounded like because the Melungeon folkways may have been blended into the folkways of country music, bluegrass, and Appalachian music. American music historians still have yet explore the cultural trail that leads to authentic Melungeon music.
The earliest delta blues by Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson was unheard of and largely unknown to exist before music historians began taking field trips to document it's history. Had there not been a few 78 rpm records left from the 1920s and 1930s the delta blues may have disappeared completely from the face of the earth by 1950.
Part of my involvement in the Gates project will be a field trip to the tri-corner region of Appalachia to collect recordings of "authentic Melungeon music" which may or may not exist. There aren't any scratchy old 78 rpm recordings of long forgotten Melungeon stars that are laying around, to my knowledge. There is no Melungeon equivalent of Mississippi John Hurt.
It's a daunting task because Melungeons live deep in the woods in remote mountainous areas that for the most part are off the grid and even the Census Bureau doesn't know where to find many Melungeon households to enumerate in the census count. I'm forced to admit the prospect of traveling those regions alone conjures up visions of the movie
Deliverance.
I won't blame you if you are skeptical about the validity of my Melungeon Connection theory. One of the board members at the Gates Foundations thought my initial proposal was a hoax, and that Malungeons came straight out of my creative imagination. If his allegations were true, I'd be getting a pretty good laugh (and a small monetary advance) at the expense of the Gates Foundation. For the sake of disclosure, I wouldn't be above perpetrating the very kind of hoax the Gates foundation board member accused me of, just to see if it was possible to fool an foundation advisory board with some wild fabricated story. Let me also add that I'd fess up to the truth if the proposal was awarded funding because jail is not a very nice place to be.
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