Gospel Music: Scottish !?!

[afleitch]

To celebrate St Andrew's Day here is some controversy. It's an old story but what do you think?

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=961062003

'The church elder’s reaction was one of utter disbelief. Shaking his head emphatically, he couldn’t take in what the distinguished professor from Yale University was telling him. "No," insisted Jim McRae, an elder of the small congregation of Clearwater in Florida. "This way of worshipping comes from our slave past. It grew out of the slave experience, when we came from Africa." But Willie Ruff, an Afro-American professor of music at Yale, was adamant - he had traced the origins of gospel music to Scotland. The distinctive psalm singing had not been brought to America’s Deep South by African slaves but by Scottish émigrés who worked as their masters and overseers, according to his painstaking research.'

The article goes into some more depth and seems rather plausable, but it goes against something that is held dear to many African-Americans- is gospel the music of the slave masters and not the slaves?

[Storebought]

I'm surprised no one commented on this (commendable) topic yet. I won't let it die.

To me, it seems natural enough that gospel music is mostly, but not entirely, Scotch-Irish in origin.

I have sadly forgotten a great deal of my music history, but I know in one instance that gospel music is not African. Consider the typical harmonies used: in traditional west African music, no chords more complex than the major third are used, even today. But gospel music contains minor thirds and sixths -- to say the least of sevenths and diminished ninths -- harmonies which could not possibly have come from west African tradition.

But some of the conclusions seem a stretch -- the Scotch-Irish were among the Southern whites least likely to own slaves, if only because they were miserably poor and couldn't afford them. So that method of cultural diffusion offered in that article, namely that Scotch overseers and such transmuted European harmonies to west African slaves -- seems a bit farfetched.

[J. J.]

Let's stop pretending that the cultural differences between Black and White people are based in melanin.  My very good friend Rena, with medium dark skin and (formerly) with dreadlocks is a lineal decsendent of Charlemagne.