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‘The “Africanization” of music. All rhythm, no melody or intellectual structure.

The article’s author was just too polite to state that — and had to dance around it with a symphony of words.’

I’m afraid you didn’t really understand me at all. You obviously have your own opinions, but I don’t agree with him. Rather than taking my meaning, you read your own meaning into what I wrote. I am not dancing around anything. The so-called “Africanization” of music in America is what produced Jazz, a uniquely American form of music, which I happen to love. Any musicologist who has studied Jazz will tell you it is a highly developed, intellectual form, which employs sophisticated melodic and harmonic elements, in addition to rhythm.

Let me add also that I do not automatically hate music that has a driving beat. I like a variety of musical styles and forms, including music with a strong beat. My comment that song has become less melodically derived than beat-driven doesn’t mean I am opposed to music with a beat. Apparently, some readers have little use for critical thought. They simply jump to their own conclusions, without regard to what a writer has actually written.

I happen to love the musical influences that came from Africa. The contribution of many timeless “Africanized” melodies, particularly in the pentatonic scale, have deeply enriched popular secular music of the mid twentieth century. And the “Negro Spiritual” has greatly influenced sacred choral literature. Though I am not black, I have sung in a black gospel choir, and frankly found that musical and spiritual experience to be as profound as any classical choral music I’ve ever sung.

The “Negro Spiritual” has greatly influenced sacred choral literature.

In his book The Soul of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: McClung, 1903), W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the Negro spiritual was the only art form that originated in America. Of course, it's a safe bet that he never saw a Navajo sand painting, and jazz and blues were a few years in the future.