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The Blues.

Origins and Transculturation

Edited by:

Vladimer Luarsabishvili

NEW VISION UNIVERSITY PRESS

TBILISI

2022

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This book contributes to the development of blues studies outside the

U.S. and within the field of academic research. Forming part of the third

volume of the book series Rethinking society. Individuals, Culture and

Migration, the principle aim of The Blues. Origins and

Transculturation is to reveal the main peculiarities of a phenomenon of

Blues in a complex world of human communication.

Of related interest:

Out of the Prison of Memory. Nations and Future

Edited by Vladimer Luarsabishvili

Published:

Vol. 1. Individuals and Society

Group of contributors

Vol. 2. Migration and Society. Literature, Translation, Film

Group of contributors

Forthcoming:

Culture and Society. Rhetorical Perspectives, Transferential Insights

New Vision University Press

11 Bokhua Str, 0159, Tbilisi

www.newvision.ge

Information on this title: http://newvision.ge/en/publications

All rights reserved. No reproduction of any part may take place without the

written permission of New Vision University Press.

© Vladimer Luarsabishvili; © individual contributors

ISBN 978-9941-9780-4-3

III

Contents

Introduction: The Blues. Origins and Transculturation..................................1

VLADIMER LUARSABISHVILI

Towards the Blues Diaspora: About Blues as an Object of Study.................3

JOSEP PEDRO

Blues and Transculturation: From West Africa To America.........................6

JOSÉ IGNACIO GONZÁLEZ MOZOS

Indian Blues: The origins of a Native-African American culture in

colonial Florida.............................................................................................48

HÉCTOR MARTÍNEZ

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Book Series Editor

Vladimer Luarsabishvili

New Vision University, Tbilisi, Georgia

Editorial Board

Tomás Albaladejo, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain

Katrine Helene Andersen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Wlad Godzich, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA

Gerardo López Sastre, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

Krzystof Polit, Maria Curie Skłodowska University, Poland

Advisory Editorial Board

Alan Barenberg, Texas Tech University, USA

Alyssa DeBlasio, Dickinson College, USA

Juan Carlos Gómez Alonso, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain

Marco Kunz, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Peter Roberts, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Nuria Sánchez Madrid, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

Javier Sánchez Zapatero, University of Salamanca, Spain

Peter Steiner, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Carlos del Valle Rojas, University of the Frontier, Chile

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Contributors

JOSÉ IGNACIO GONZÁLEZ MOZOS is Associate Professor at the

University of Castilla la Mancha. He received his master’s degree in

musical research from University of Castilla la Mancha (2015), and

Doctor Cum Laude in Humanities, Art and Education from the same

university (2018). He was Superior Professor of Trombone by the Real

Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid (1994) and Superior

Professor of Tuba-Euphonium by the Real Conservatorio Superior de

Música de Madrid (1997). From 1999 to the present, he is the Titular

professor of music in secondary education at the Castilla la Mancha

Community Board. He was the Trombone teacher at the “Marcos

Redondo” Professional Music Conservatory of Ciudad Real, from the

1993-1994 academic year to the 1997-1998 academic year, Trombone

teacher at the Music Schools of Miguelturra and Almagro (Ciudad

Real), from 2001 to 2014, Visiting professor in instrumental

improvement courses, such as the Martín Códax Course in Segovia and

Villafranca de los Caballeros (Toledo), and Principal trombone of the

La Mancha Philharmonic Orchestra, from 2007 to 2016. Currently he

is the Main trombone of the Ciudad Real Symphony Orchestra, from

1996 to the present. He has collaborated with symphonic formations

such as the Craiova State Orchestra (Romania), the Cameralis

Academia de Brno (Czech Republic), the Symphonic Orchestra of the

Community of Madrid or the Orchestra of the National Lyric Company,

among others, as well as in various groups chamber music.

HÉCTOR MARTÍNEZ, studied Industrial Engineering in Madrid,

Spain, and Orléans, France, and History and Geography degree in

Madrid. Currently, he is director of sustainability and climate change in

an international consultancy company, professor of Sustainability in a

master’s degree at Polytechnic University of Madrid, president of the

Madrid Blues Society, blues music divulger in written media and

collaborator in radio programs. His research focuses on modern and

contemporary history, esp. Afro-American and blues history. Recent

publications include Sostenibilidad en la Construcción: J. García

Navarro, ed. (Madrid: IETcc, 2013), Comer y Cantar. Soul Food &

Blues (Girona: Lenoir Ediciones, 2019), and Al Compás del Vudú.

Religión, represión y música (Granada: Allanamiento de Mirada,

2022). Currently he is preparing a book with a collection of articles on

African American history through blues music lyrics.

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JOSEP PEDRO is Assistant Professor at Universidad Carlos III de

Madrid (UC3M), Department of Communication. He is a member of

the research group Audiovisual Diversity (UC3M). He holds a PhD in

Journalism (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), a master’s degree in

Sociocultural Analysis (UCM), and a degree in Audiovisual

Communication (UV). He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University

of Texas at Austin, at Birmingham City University, and at the

University of Porto. He is the author of the monograph El Blues en

España (The Blues in Spain, Tirant Lo Blanch, 2021), and has written

extensively about blues music. He has published articles in journals

such as Atlantic Studies, Signa, Jazz Research Journal and EU-topías,

and has written chapters in the volumes Communicative Justice in the

Pluriverse (Routledge, 2022), Jazz and Totalitarianism (Routledge,

2017), Talking Back to Globalization (Peter Lang, 2016), and The

Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (Cambridge

University Press, 2016). His research interests include popular music,

cultural industries, communication, and ethnography.

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Introduction: The Blues. Origins and Transculturation

VLADIMER LUARSABISHVILI

The book series Rethinking society. Individuals, Culture and Migration

aims to describe the structural peculiarities and functional

characteristics of modern society. In the era of globalization,

multiculturalism and massive migrations, the disappearance of one set

of values and the appearance of another is observable. Society as a form

of human interactions is subjected to revision and re-definition from the

points of view of philosophy, rhetoric, history, literature and

psychology, among others.

Rethinking society means the critical examination of modern ways of

communication and their impact on the creation of new sets of values.

Different approaches to the system of education and its role in the

formation of free individuals may be of crucial importance for personal

liberty and for establishment of liberal democracies all round the world.

Individuals are the main composers of human progress due to their

different and original approaches to human values and basic rights. As

Bertrand Russell put it, “[…] a community needs, if it is to prosper, a

certain number of individuals who do not wholly conform to the general

type. Practically all progress, artistic, moral, and intellectual, was

dependent upon such individuals, who have been a decisive factor in

the transition from barbarism to civilization.” The role of individual

needs to be reconsidered in modern socio-cultural ambience and

historical context which is one of the main challenges for modern

society.

Culture is an ambience where values are formed and shared. Peter

Burke indicates the coexistence of Cultural History and History of

Cultures making emphasis on five moments of the development of the

History of Culture in different parts of the world. The cultural tradition

is a mode of experience and acting which reveals the intellectual

possibilities and human perspectives of creation and thinking. “Studies

in Culture” may contain basic mechanisms of human relations

demonstrating the acceptance or rejection of ideas, values and relations.

Migration facilitates diffusion of ideas and values, reveals possibilities

for adaptation in the new topos and conditions the formation of new

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individual and/or collective narrative. According to Stephen Greenblatt,

in an age of global mobility we need to rethink the essence of culture.

* * *

The Blues. Origins and Transculturation is the third volume of the book

series Rethinking society. Individuals, Culture and Migration. Its

principle aim is to reveal the main peculiarities of miscegenation that

began in the Modern Age in the colonies of Louisiana and Florida,

favored by the less repressive environment of these territories in French

and Spanish hands, as well as to analyze, on the one hand, the strong

link that blues had with the forms of urban popular music that formed

the style called rhythm and blues, and to study the leaks that this Afro-

American musical style had on the European and, especially, Spanish

pop-rock of the sixties. As a book series editor, I would like to thank all

authors for their kind participation – I indicate here my sincere debt to

them for their encouragement with this project. Special thanks to the

members of Editorial and Advisory Editorial Boards for their remarks

and suggestions.

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Towards the Blues Diaspora: About Blues as an Object of Study

JOSEP PEDRO

When Vladimer Luarsabishvili got in touch me, explaining that he was

working on the publication of a book dedicated to the blues, I reacted

with surprise and joy. The combination of these emotions is explained,

firstly, by the rare publication of volumes on blues in the academic

field, particularly in the Spanish context, even in the Spanish-speaking

one, although this was a project in English. Apart from the news and

the invitation, it was striking to me that Vladimer was writing to me

from Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, a country located at the intersection

between Europe and Asia, which I knew very little of. His experience

and research proved that Georgia had also been touched by the powerful

influence of the blues.

In the globalization of blues music, I confirmed once more, this

foundational popular expression of African-American origin has left its

mark on countless territories, fostering certain translocal bonds, present

though not always recognized, from which further collaborations and

camaraderie may be established. Without going any further, I began to

write these lines on an Alfa train that travels through Portugal from

south to north, passing through my destination, Porto. I am immersed

in a research stay focused on the study of blues and jazz scenes in

Portugal, with special attention to relations with Spain. The relationship

of Spanish and Portuguese blues and jazz is undoubtedly growing, and

I remember the words of Rui Guerreiro, president of the BB Blues

Portugal association, based in Baixa da Banheira, southeast of Lisbon,

on the other side of the river Tagus. In contrast with the notion of

Portugal as an “unknown neighbor”, which was posited in the 2013

Blues Yearbook in Spain (edited by Societat de Blues de Barcelona),

Rui now affirmed a more recently acquired sense of belonging: “We

feel completely integrated in the blues community in Spain. We even

think that we can speak of an Iberian Blues community” (personal

interview, 04/10/2022).

Vladimer told me about the collection “Rethinking Society. Individuals,

culture and migration”, founded at New Vision University (Georgia) in

2020, and frame of reference for this new book: The Blues. Origins and

Transculturation. Besides Vladimer’s presence as editor, when I looked

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into it I discovered the presence of Spanish researchers on the editorial

board: colleagues from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Universidad

de Castilla-La Mancha, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and

Universidad de Salamanca. Also, other staff from U.S, Chilean, Swiss,

Danish, Polish and New Zealand universities, belonging to different

departments and disciplines. Among them are Tomás Albaladejo

(UAM), who supervised Vladimer’s PhD thesis on Spanish literature,

and Javier Sánchez Zapatero (USAL), whom I know from the novel and

film noir conferences he organizes annually.

The Blues. Origins and Transculturation presents a new take on the

blues, and hopefully it will contribute to strengthen the development of

different research lines related to it. The introduction, written by

Vladimer Luarsabishvili, situates the volume within the mentioned

book series, and delves into the notions of society, individuals, culture

and migration. Indeed, since its origins, the history of the blues has been

marked by displacement and cultural formation, as well as by

migrations from South to North and subsequent globalization

processes. Two extensive and detailed chapters follow. The first one is

“Blues and Transculturation: From West Africa To America”, by José

Ignacio González Mozos (PhD at UCLM). It explores the historical

development of blues since the early twentieth century, and it is

particularly interested in the post-WWII evolution of blues, rhythm &

blues and soul. The focus on the United States leads to a reflection on

rhythm and blues in Europe and in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship.

This includes a discussion on the reception of rock ‘n’ roll and rock

culture along with a study of the influence of blues in Spanish popular

music, with a particular focus on the 1960s.

The following chapter is “Indian Blues: The origins of a Native-African

American culture in colonial Florida”, by Héctor Martínez. Sharing a

historical inspiration with the previous text, it addresses the colonial

context in Florida, United States, focusing on the development of a

Native African-American culture. As pointed out by Martínez, there

were key artists in blues history who were from Native American

descent, including rural pioneer Charlie Patton and influential singer-

guitarist T-Bone-Walker. The chapter draws on significant song lyrics

and territories, while discussing the ongoing construction of the North

American nation and its relation with European countries such as Spain

and the United Kingdom. Thus, the author provides a contextualized

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selection of artists and songs that express and deal with the Native

American identity.

This book contributes to the development of blues studies within the

field of academic research. A valuable effort, it adds to the

interdisciplinary research on the blues that has been going on since the

early to mid-20th century. More particularly, it builds new ground for

the development of blues studies outside the U.S., in what we might call

the blues diaspora context. Such studies, like the more established

diasporic jazz studies, seek to explore cultural, social and political

aspects of the development of blues both in the U.S. and in other

territories, where the influence of blues has been and continues to be

transformative.

6

Blues and Transculturation: From West Africa To America

José Ignacio González Mozos

Abstract: The development of the different styles of blues throughout the 1920s and

1930s had a special impact on the birth of rhythm and blues and on the influence, it

had on the genres of urban popular music developed after the Second World War.

Through this chapter we will analyze, on the one hand, the strong link that blues had

with the forms of urban popular music that formed the style called rhythm and blues.

On the other hand, and as the main objective of this chapter, we will study the leaks

that this Afro-American musical style had on the European and, especially, Spanish

pop-rock of the sixties. In conclusion, the evolution of the blues in the direction of

rhythm and blues and its return to Europe through the leaks it experienced in Spanish

pop-rock of the period so-called “desarrollismo”, will form the basis of the content

that we will develop throughout this work.

Keywords: Syncretism, blues, rhythm and blues, leaks, desarrollismo, Spanish pop-

rock.

By 1822, Major Alexander Gordon Laing was exploring the territories

of West Africa in command of the Royal African Corps, with the aim

of consolidating the lines of communication between Britain and the

kingdoms of sub-Saharan West Africa. During the arduous journey

through Sierra Leone, Major Laing could not have suspected that the

song that griot dedicated to him in Seemera was the primordial

antecedent of the music that, years later, the songster would transform

into the African-American blues.

At parting, he sent his griot or minstrel top lay before me, and sing a song

of welcome: this man, of whom I give a sketch, had a sort of fiddle, the

body of which was formed of a calabash, in which two small square holes

were cut to give it a tone; it had only one string, composed of many

twisted horse-hairs, and although he could only bring from it four notes,

yet he contrived to vary them so as to produce a pleasing harmony; he

played at my door till I fell asleep (Laing, 1825: 148).

The musical traditions described by Major Laing, which were current

in large parts of West Africa when the Atlantic slave trade of Africans

to America was still in full swing, had an enormous impact on the

development of most African-American-based popular music genres

established on the American continent. To Alexander Gordon Laing's

testimony, we can also add that of the British traveler Thomas Edward

Bowdich, who around 1820 published Mission from Cape Coast Castle

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to Ashantee: with a descriptive account of that kingdom. Both

documents provide clear evidence of the links between African music

and the music developed in America by slaves brought from the west

coast of Africa.

With this in mind, we must underline the fact that in certain African-

American popular music such as the blues, these parallels are

particularly noticeable. Such links are manifested not only in not

through the use of modal scales and stringed instruments, but through

character and vocal expression articulated around certain antiphonal

call-and-response structures, a procedure that is widespread in

traditional African music and appears in both religious and secular

African-American-based genres. As Thomas Edward Bowdich

observed on his trip to the Ashantee Kingdom: “the whole of the

establishment of the palace shout, and their shout is echoed by the

people throughout the town” (Bowdich, 1873: 230), a detail that shows

us the importance of the antiphonal call-response structure in West

African music, a reflection of the influence it would later exert on

American popular music.

However, although the African antiphonal structure is one of the bases

for the development of African-American folk music in North America,

the evolution of the musical instruments built there by the slaves in the

image of those played in Africa is no less important. Gerhard Kubik

makes an interesting correspondence on the banjar, the African

predecessor of the banjo in North America. Alongside the guitar, this

chordophone regularly accompanied early African-American folk

singers and bands:

During the eighteenth century the British slave trade brought many

people through the Gambia/Senegal corridor to the United States. Some

of these came from far inner parts of the West African savannah and

sahel zone. They were settled in the seaboard states of Maryland,

Virginia, North Carolina, South Caroline, and Georgia, within the

thirteen early colonies. It is likely that plucked lutes of any of the West

African Savannah designs were reconstructed by slaves, both in the

Caribbean and in the seaboard states of the British colonies [...] After

1776, on the plantations founded in the interior, where the use of drums

by Africans was suppressed, the «banjar» derivatives or proto-banjos

became popular in many experimental homemade construction variants

(Kubik, 2017: 102).

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The development of African and Anglo-Saxon call-and-response

antiphonal structures and the evolution of the musical instruments that

accompanied these musics contributed to the emergence of blackface

minstrel shows in the early 19th century and the enshrinement of

musical genres such as cakewalk, blues and ragtime, while establishing

the use of instruments such as the banjo and fiddle for accompaniment.

Likewise, the development of syncopated rhythms through the

performance of coon songs, work songs and fields holler -exclamations

used by African-American slaves in the hard work they carried out on

the plantations-, together with dances such as the toe and heel, the juba

or the breakdown, helped the development of the blackface minstrel

shows.

The impact of these dances among the slave population on the

plantations was narrated by Solomon Northup as follows:

My task for those feast days was to play the fiddle [...] the dance resumes

till dawn. And the fiddling does not cease, but the attendants themselves

play a peculiar music. It is called clapping [Juba] and is the

accompaniment to one of those meaningless chants [...] The clapping is

done by first beating the hands on the knees, then the hands between

them, then the right shoulder with one hand and the left with the other,

while tapping the rhythm with the feet, singing (Northup, 2014: 175-

180).

Be that as it may, we can trace the beginnings of the blues both to the

emergence of syncopated music and the fields holler, and to the

performances of songster ballads and compositions for the first

syncopated instrumental bands, which, like that of William Handy,

known as “The father of the blues”, managed to bring the formal

twelve-bar structures and harmonies based on the I, IV and V degrees

of the scale, from the rural environments of the South to the urban

environments of the North.

Negroes react rhythmically to everything. That's how the blues came to

be. Sometimes I think that rhythm is our middle name. When the sweet

good man packs his trunk and goes, that is occasion for some low

moaning. When dark town puts on its new shoes and takes off the brakes,

jazz step in. If it's the New Jerusalem and the River Jordan we're

studying, we make the spirituals (Handy, 1941: 82).

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William Handy's “Memphis blues” (1912), “St Louis blues” (1914) and

“Yellow dog blues” (1919) represented an early attempt to popularize

a musical form which in 1920 Mamie Smith gave its characteristic

features in her “Crazy blues”,1 one of the first blues recordings. In the

following years of the 1920s, other artists such as Ma Rainey

accentuated the melancholic character of the blues with recordings such

as “Moonshine blues/Southern blues”2 (1924) and “Slave to the

blues/Oh my babe blues” (1926).3 The twelve-bar structure based on

the harmonic sequence of I, IV and V inherited the sad and melancholic

character of the early bluesmen who developed their music in marginal

environments dotted with clubs, violence and misery, where

penitentiaries and rural plantations, such as the Dockery and the

Parchman, were part of the regular landscape.

African-Americans became the main inhabitants of the penitentiary

centres during the first half of the 20th century and this was obviously

reflected in the blues. Prisons such as Angola Prison in Louisiana or

Parchman Prison Farm in Mississippi were as important for the

development of the blues as the Dockery Plantation in the Delta or the

Beale Street Clubs in Memphis (López Poy, 2018:101).

After a first stage of assimilation and development, other authors such

as Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charlie Patton,

Son House, Elmore James, Sony Boy Willianson, Big Bill Broonzye or

Bessie Smith, helped the definitive development of blues music,

consolidating during the thirties the hatching of the race record market,

the prelude to rhythm and blues.

From Blues to Rhythm and Blues: The Influence of Blues on Urban

Popular Music Genres after the Second World War

By the early 1940s, the blues was beginning to spread from the

segregated regions of the South to the industrialized cities of the North.

Chicago was one of the most important centers for the development of

a particular style of blues in which musicians such as Muddy Waters,

Howlin' Wolf, Big Joe Turner, John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon and B.B.

1 Okeh, 1920, Ref. number: 4169.

2 Paramount, 1924, Ref. number: 12083.

3 Paramount. 1926, Ref. number: 12332.

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King left a deep imprint that transformed the rural southern blues into

electrified Chicago-style blues. The electrification of the blues, together

with the attempt to bring its harsh and melancholic lyrics closer to the

tastes of the white pop market, were the two fundamental pillars on

which it was based after the Second World War, a rapid evolution that

led it in the direction of the rhythm and blues that was emerging

strongly at the end of the 1940s in the Western record market.

One of the first major transformations came from what was then known

as race music. Race music was a label intended to catalogue recordings

made by African-American musicians and also aimed at the African-

American market. Since the early 1920s, record companies such as

Columbia, Okeh, Paramount and Victor4 had made a variety of

recordings that included most popular genres of African-American

music, from religious sermons to blues to jazz music. All these musical

recordings aimed at the African-American music market were labelled

race music to differentiate them from those recorded by white musicians.

By 1948, however, the clearly discriminatory and demeaning race label

was dropped in favor of the so-called rhythm and blues.5 Rhythm and

blues embodied a wide range of music that again referred to African-

American based genres such as electric blues, boogie-woogie, doo-wop

or soul in combination with secular pop music. The term, devised by

Jerry Wexler, had an important influence on the development of rock'n

roll music and some of the genres that derived from it (González Mozos,

2018: 91-92).

The term rhythm and blues encompassed, therefore, a wide diversity of

Afro-American-based musical genres focused almost exclusively on

the urban environment and with a clear danceable purpose, styles that

inevitably marked the history of popular music in the Western world

throughout the second half of the 20th century.6 On the emergence of

4 https://sandiegotroubadour.com/2015/10/race-records-the-birth-of-black-blues-and-

jazz/ [29-9-2018]

5 “On 25 June 1949, Billboard magazine, a sort of record yearbook, referred to this

same music [African-American music] as rhythm & blues, and from then on, this new

term was used. All the black music of the time, from swing orchestras to solo

bluesmen to variety singers, came under this name. However, rhythm & blues came

to designate a specific genre of black music that blends the influences of swing jazz

with those of blues and boogie-woogie in which a blues shouter with an elegant,

urbane style, giving instrumental prominence to brass and piano, was presented as the

visible head” (Herzhaft, G. La gran enciclopedia del blues. Barcelona: Ediciones

Robinbook, 2003: 275).

6 The African-American bluesman Johnny Copeland describes the rhythm and blues

music scene around which the youth of the American city of Houston gravitated in

the early 1950s: “Everybody wanted to get out, to go to the music -gospel in the

11

the rhythm and blues style and its subsequent importance in the

development of urban popular music in the second half of the 20th

century, professors Bill C. Malone and David Stricklin state:

Led by such musicians as Eddie Durham, Charlie Christian, and Aaron

«T-Bone» Walker, blues performers everywhere after 1934 began

electrifying their guitars. They also increased the size of their combos,

adding pianos, saxophones or other horns, basses, and drums. By the end

of the 1930s, the term race was passing out of usage and blues as it had

been known was being replaced by a form more consonant with the city,

what came to be known as rhythm and blues. Like race music before it,

rhythm and blues served as an umbrella phrase for a large number of

black styles that were often very different from each other and were

played by a diverse set of musicians. It drew energy from the booguie-

wooguie jazz rhythm developed by the late 1920s and prefigured even in

certain ragtime pieces [...] rhythm and blues was much more oriented

toward dancing than country blues ever had been. It was urban,

aggressive, electrified, and youth-oriented [...] Rhythm and blues also

helped bring about the music revolution known as rock'n roll (Malone &

Stricklin, 2003: 75).

Following this contribution in which rhythm and blues music is

identified with the terms urban, aggressive, electrified, and youth-

oriented, we can assume that the main musical styles that were included

within the term were born thanks to the electrification of guitars and the

incorporation of wind instrument sections within the original blues

music formations:7 “Early rhythm and blues instrumentation is

characterized by the interplay of screaming vocals or soulful ballads

churches, rhythm and blues in the city-. The wages were low and the music talked to

the people [...] There were hardly any televisions and only two black radio stations,

KCOH and KYOK, but dances were held on Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday,

Sunday, and sometimes Wednesday at the Eldorado Ballroom, Club Matinee,

Diamond L. Ranch, Club Ebony, Shady´s Playhouse, Double bar Ranch, and Club

Savoy” (Govenar, 2004: 8).

7 In light of the changing musical tastes of African-American citizens settled in the

large cities of the United States, and how this change in musical tastes motivated the

transformation of Southern blues into urban rhythm and blues, Dick Weissman points

out: “Although the continuing flow of Delta migrants to Chicago offered the blues

musicians a definitive audience for blues, as time moved on and the black population

was exposed to jazz, and later to rhythm and blues, it began to lose interest in the older

blues styles. These black emigrants identified the blues with their hard life in the

south, replete with poverty and sharecropping. This music and its associations became

less and less attractive to the urbanized population. Out of this restlesness with the

down-home subject matter and rural instrumentation of the folk blues artist came the

impetus for rhythm and blues” (Weissman, 2005: 86).

12

with electric guitar, saxophone, piano and drums” (Govenar, 2004: 9).

It was precisely in these urban centers that southern blues evolved in its

purely danceable and commercial facet, which led to the entrenchment

of rhythm and blues throughout the 1940s.

In this sense, the change in the traditional role played by blues musical

instruments was one of the keys that made the transformation from

rural blues to the more urban rhythm and blues possible. It should also

be noted that these technical innovations, as well as the development of

a new entertainment culture among the new generations of African-

American citizens settled in the urban areas of the North Country, led

to the emergence of the broad spectrum of musical genres that shaped

rhythm and blues. The list of musical genres ranged from blues music

in its various styles to doo-wop vocal groups, gospel music and soul.

On the evolution that blues bands underwent on their way to rhythm

and blues and the leading role of the electric guitar in the bands, Dick

Weissman points out:

Rhythm and blues was characterized by a new sound: the sound of the

electric guitar. Along with the honking saxophone, piano, bass, and

drums, the guitar became a leading voice in every r&b ensemble.

Amplification made this possible. Before the introduction of the electric

guitar, the guitar was not really an efficient instrument for playing solo

lines with orchestral groups or even small ensembles [...] Playing

melodic lines required the use of microphones, and even with a

microphone the guitar tended to be drowned out by horns [...] T-Bone

Walker was the first one to use the guitar to play melodic phrases like a

horn (Weissman, 2005: 86-87).

The importance of the electric guitar's leadership in rhythm and blues

groups was of great importance in the evolution of urban popular music

in the 1950s and 1960s, especially thanks to the work of African-

American musicians such as T-Bone Walker. T-Bone Walker's

contributions led to the beginning of modern blues and, consequently,

to the development of rhythm and blues and the musical genres that

were integrated into it. This was possible because Walker established

the leadership of the electric guitar through a personal sound that

prioritized the melodic line and swing over other elements. The blues

tempo he used often oscillated between the quietness of the ballads and

the relatively lively tempos of the electric blues. Thanks to “Call it

13

Stormy Monday (But Tuesday is Just as Bad)”,8 recorded in 1947, T-

Bone Walker achieved an important success in the rhythm and blues

charts, creating a peculiar style that was followed by other musicians.

T-Bone Walker epitomized the idiom of rhythm and blues, and he had a

profound influence on the electric guitarists who followed him, including

Johnny Copeland, Joe Hughes, Pete Mayes, Roy Gaines, Clarence

Green, Zuzu Bollin, T.D. Bell, Blues Boy Hubbard, and B.B. King, as

well as their white successors, including Johnny Winter, Duke Robillard,

Ronnie Earl, Jimmie and Steve Ray Vaughan, and Anson Funderburgh

(Govenar, 2004: 13).

One of the most important developments in the evolution of rhythm and

blues took place in the music charts of early 1950s America. This

phenomenon consisted in the gradual inclusion of rhythm and blues hits

in the pop music charts for white audiences.9 The phenomenon, which

was a one-off in the early 1950s, multiplied after the release of songs

such as “Sixty Minutes Man” by The Dominoes and “Sh-boom”,10

recorded by the African-American group The Chords. Thus, thanks to

“Sh-boom”, the rhythm and blues style known as doo-wop gained

popularity among both young white and African-American audiences.

[Doo-wop] A style practiced in the 1950s by black rhythm and blues

vocal groups, who often based their harmonies on simple, repeated doo-

wop-like phrases. However, the term is not applicable to any kind of song

in which meaningless syllables are repeated, but to the kind of choral

pieces embellished with various vocal harmonies popularized by the so-

called street-corner groups [...]. Some classic singles of the doo-wop era,

almost always recorded by glorious one-hit wonders, were «Gee» by The

Crowns, «Sh-Boom» by The Chords, «Get a job» by The Silhouettes,

8 West Soul, 1967, Ref. number: WS-1002.

9 “When The Chords´ «Sh-boom» crossed over from the rhythm and Blues charts into

the predominantly white pop charts in july 1954, it was not the first r&b record to leap

that racial and commercial divide [...] The Dominoes´ «Sixty-minute man», Lloyd

Price´s «Lawdy Miss Clawdy», and Faye Adams´ «Shake a hand» were among the

other r&b records which had appeared on that chart earlier still [...] In 1950, for

example, only three of the record which made the national Rhythm and Blues charts

also crossed over into the pop field: and all three -saxophonist Lynn Hope´s

«Tenderly», Nat King Cole´s «Mona Lisa», and Billy Eckstine´s «Sitting by the

window»- were markedly from the slicker end of the broad r&b spectrum. Before

«Sh-boom», r&b forays into the pop record charts were relatively isolated phenomena

[...] After «Sh-boom», however, there was a sustained surge of r&b into the pop

charts, with more than twice of many records crossing over in 1954 as in the previous

year” (Ward, 1998: 19- 20).

10 Cat records, 1954, Ref. number: 45-104.

14

«The ten commandments of love» by The Moonglows, «Only you» by

The Platters, «The book of love» by The monotones, «In the still of the

night» by The Five Satins, «Why do fools fall in love?» by Frankie

Lymon & The Teenagers (Lapuente, 2015: 20).

We could say, therefore, that it was from the success of “Sh-boom” on

the pop music charts in 1954 that rhythm & blues began to carve out an

important niche for itself in the urban popular music of segregated

America in the 1950s. The months that followed its release saw the

emergence of other rhythm & blues hits on the pop market. These

included Joe Turner's “Shake, Rattle and Rock”,11 LaVern Baker's

“Tweedlee dee”,12 “Hearts of Stone”13 by The Charms, “Ling Tin Ton”

by Five Keys or “Goodnight Sweetheart Goodnight”14 by The Spaniels,

a trend that indicates the sudden and unstoppable boom that the doo-

wop style was acquiring in the pop market, a fact that would influence

the emergence of rock'n roll in the mid-fifties.

But what were the main characteristics of this musical style? The doo-

wop style of the mid-1950s was based on the use of lyrics inspired by

themes of youthful love, as well as on the careful elaboration of vocal

harmonies, inherited, in a way, from the choral tradition of African-

American gospel music. The polarisation of the voices15 was another

essential feature of the doo-wop style, forming a compact harmonic

structure that played between the cavernous timbre of the bass - who

used to imitate with his voice the typical form in instrumental playing -

and the warm falsettos of the soloist, as well as the use of curious vocal

onomatopoeias16 that were performed by the rest of the group.

11 Atlantic, 1954, Ref. number: 45-1026.

12 Atlantic, 1955, Ref. number: 45-1047.

13 Deluxe, 1954, Ref. number: 45-6062.

14 Oldies 45, 1964, Ref. number: OL-23.

15 Doo-wop groups usually consisted of between three and five singers, the most

common being a vocal quartet. In these groups, there was a clear tendency to

emphasise the extreme voices of the group, that is, there was an attempt to exaggerate

the melodic and timbral leap between the bass voice and the lead voice, a voice that

usually used the technical resource of falsetto. This timbral contrast between the

extreme voices of the group, together with the use of onomatopoeias and youth-

inspired lyrics, gave doo-wop groups an irresistible appeal among black and white

American teenagers in the early 1950s.

16 Onomatopoeic sounds were common in the performances of doo-wop vocal groups.

Their purpose was to provide a rhythmic-harmonic filler to the soloist's voice in order

to give it an aura of novelty. The most commonly used onomatopoeias were: sh-boom,

15

As music critic Luis Lapuente suggests: “Doo-wop was just one more

(wonderful) link in the chain that began to take shape with Louis Jordan,

The Ink Spots and the Soul Stirrers, to be perfected with The

Temptations, Marvin Gaye and The Impressions and ended, for the time

being, with Jill Scott, India Arie and Anthony Hamilton” (Lapuente,

2015: 20). The doo-wop style could therefore be conceived as a logical

evolution of African-American urban popular rhythm and blues music

on its way to soul music, contributing, in turn, to the emergence of rock

& roll. The honeyed, velvety timbres of the doo-wop soloists made this

possible by definitively distancing themselves from the harshness and

realism of the vehement blues vocal style. Recordings by the genre's

leading groups, such as The Platters, The Temptations, The Coaster,

The Orioles, The Flamingos, Spaniels, The Larks and The Drifters

suggest this. Tracks such as “Save the last dance for me” by The

Drifters,17 “Charlie Brown”18 by The Coaster, “Crying in the Chapel”

by The Orioles, or “Only You” and “The Great Pretender” by The

Platters, began to clearly target both the white pop and rock'n roll

market and the African-American soul market.

This first incursion of the doo-wop style was followed by the

incorporation of other music such as gospel and soul within the term

rhythm and blues, styles that played an important role in its

consecration, becoming part of this essential genre in the development

of popular urban music in the West during the second half of the

century. Thus, the success of gospel music meant that in the second half

of the 20th century it was introduced into rhythm and blues as another

expression of black popular music. This fact motivated that at the end

of the forties most of the record companies that distributed rhythm and

blues music included religious gospel records in their catalogues,

standing out labels such as the independent Apollo, the Savoy company

or the also independent record label from the city of Houston, Peacock

Records,19 labels that helped in a fundamental way to the consecration

of gospel music within rhythm and blues.

doo-wop, uuua-uuua, oom-pahp, bomp-baba-bomp, etc. As we can deduce, the name

of the musical style is fully justified taking into account the rhythmic-harmonic

onomatopoeias that were used.

17 Atlantic, 1960, Ref. number: 45-2071.

18 ATCO Records, 1959, Ref. number: 45-6132.

19 “Houston businessman Don Robey founded Peacock Records in 1949 to record

Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, a headliner in Robey´s Bronze Peacock Club. Robey

16

The popularity of gospel was made possible by the recordings that

pastors such as Calvin P. Dixon, J. M. Gates and preacher J. C. Burnett

made for the Columbia records company. In this regard, Reverend

Doctor Tim Barger notes: “The superstar of the phonograph preachers

was the Rev. James M. Gates of Atlanta, whose first two records,

Death's Black Train Is Coming and I'm Gonna Die with the Staff in My

Hand, were 50,000-copy bestsellers in 1926” (Barger, 3-1-2015).20 The

use of electronic recording media was a huge breakthrough both in

improving the sound quality of the records and in the rapid

dissemination of African-American church music, which distributed

more than 50,000 copies of Reverend Gates' sermon records to the

public in 1926.

Reverend Gates's first recording had the benefit of cutting-edge

technology. Columbia was the first of many labels to purchase Western

Electric's electric recording system [...] Electric recording replaced the

recording horn with carbon microphones. Microphones produced

superior sound and made it possible to increase the audio frequency

range of the recording. The microphone captured and amplified central

sound performances and attenuated others [...] The company (Columbia)

recorded Reverend Gates in Atlanta with its innovative recordings

technology. Unlike his preaching-on wax predecessors who recorded

their solo lecturing voices in the rigid confines of recording studios, the

Baptist minister had the benefit of preaching his recorded sermon in the

familiar surroundings and comfort of his own church in the present of

his congregation [...] This time, Columbia captured a recorded sermon

that not only had superior sound quality, but also had the contextual

benefit of a migrant church sanctuary and the accompanying rituals.

Columbia's recording of Gates thus captured a black evangelical worship

service [...] The first release, Death's Black Train is Coming, was put on

sale on July 20, 1926. It packaged and transmitted the folk worship of

Reverend Gates and Mount Calvary across the country (Martin, 2014:

98-100).

had opened the Peacock in 1946 as a restaurant and music showplace for Walker,

Louis Jordan, Ruth Brown, and the other rhythm and blues stars of the day. Evelyn

Johnson, Robey´s longtime business associate, recalled: ‘The Bronze Peacock

attracted a mixed audience, black and white. Different companies and social clubs had

parties there. We had the finest food and chefs’” (Govenar, 2004: 13).

20 Barger, TK. (2015). Author looks at history of folk sermons, pastor who delivered

them. The Blade. 3-1-2015.

http://www.toledoblade.com/Religion/2015/01/03/Author-looks-at-history-of-folk-

sermons-pastors-who-delivered-them.html [Consulted 1-3-2022].

17

During the 1940s a number of soloists and vocal quartets appeared that

helped to enshrine this African-American religious style within rhythm

and blues. These included Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetha Tharpe,

Willie Mae Ford Smith, The Golden Gate Quartet, The Birmingham

Jubilee Singers, The Famous Blue Jay Singers, The Dixie

Hummingbirds, The Swan Silverstones and The Soul Stirrers, whose

lead singer, Sam Cooke, made a fundamental contribution to the

development of soul music.

Along these lines, one of the first commercial gospel music groups

within the rhythm and blues framework was created in 1950 by

Professor Billy Ward, under the name of The Dominoes. Their first hit,

“Sixty Minutes Man”,21 placed the melodic responsibility on the

group's bass. Within this vocal style, other groups appeared that

revolved around the gospel music of the 1950s. Among them, The Ink

Spots, Drifters, Five Royales, Midnighters or James Brown and the

Famous Flames developed a style close to preachers' singing, supported

by a minimal instrumental accompaniment over a repetitive and

irregular rhythm. Meanwhile, in the sixties, a gospel style influenced

by both blues and soul music appeared in which Bobby Bland stood out

with “Cry, Cry, Cry”22 and “Turn on Your Lovelight”23 and Junior

Parker with “Annie get Your Yo Yo”.24 Both musicians, who had been

members of The Beale Streeters in 1950 before Parker formed The Blue

Flames in 1951, established a style of rhythm and blues music close to

soul, which Parker approached in “I'm so satisfied”.25

African-American music was also present in the civil rights struggles

that took place in America during the 1960s, playing a key role in

spreading the political messages of African-American citizens, a role it

had already played in the years of slavery through coded messages

embedded in the lyrics of spirituals and work songs. In the early 1960s,

however, it was political gospel and, later, soul music that served as a

vehicle for the old messages. Thus, Mahalia Jackson's political gospel

gave strength and encouragement to civil rights activists in the crucial

days of the movement, while soul denounced in Sam Cooke's voice the

21 King, 1951, Ref. number: 45-15002.

22 Duke, 1960, Ref. number: UV 7046 (327).

23 Duke, 1961, Ref. number: UV 7082 (D 344).

24 Duke, 1961, Ref. number: UV 7084 (D 345).

25 Blue Rock, 1969, Ref. number: B-4080.

18

miseries and injustices faced by the African-American race in certain

regions of North America. In this sense, and although Sam Cooke was

the first to raise his voice against the discriminatory situation in soul

songs such as “Chain gang” and “The Change is Gonna Come”, it was

up to Mahalia to make music that was really committed to change.

Soul thus took the call-and-response principles of the gospel choir and

soloist, its vocal turns, characteristic shouts and sounds, accentuated

rhythms, clapping and body movements, and blended them with the

secular lyrics, boogie-woogie and blues rhythms of rhythm and blues

music. Soul thus became a musical style coming directly from gospel,

but taking the strength of the instrumental sound and rhythms present

in rhythm and blues music.26 However, soul music did not only take the

technical elements of gospel and blues, soul was also imbued with its

message of protest and proclamations of equality and tolerance, a

message of freedom that Aretha Franklin, the Queen of soul, expressed

with a strong, soaring voice in “Freedom”.

Artists such as Aretha Franklin used the melodic roots of gospel music

sifted by the rhythmic force of rhythm and blues in her personal style.

The result was the emergence of a soulful, emotionally charged and

soulful soul that became very popular with rhythm and blues audiences.

The five albums she released between 1970 and 1972 reflect the deeper

roots of the racial issues that were beginning to emerge thanks to the

human rights movement. At the age of fourteen, Aretha made her first

recording, The Gospel Soul of Aretha Franklin,27 an album containing

gospel-based compositions accompanied by a forceful soulful piano

sound. The album, recorded in 1956, anticipated the appearance of

others such as The Electrifying Aretha,28 in 1962; Laughing on the

Outside,29 in 1963, and Running out of fools,30 in 1964. I Never loved a

Man The Way I Love You,31 the first album she recorded on the Atlantic

label, was released in 1967 with “Respect”, originally written by Otis

26 In the words of Luis Lapuente: “Soul was born in the early 1960s from the fortunate

encounter between gospel, electric rhythm and blues and southern country, as a

fabulous outlet for the illusions of racial equality generated by the Civil Rights

Movement” (Lapuente, 2015: 13).

27 Reprinted in Checker, 1965, Ref. Number: LPS 10009.

28 Columbia, 1962, Ref. number: CS 8561.

29 Columbia, 1963, Ref. number: CS 8879.

30 Columbia, 1964, Ref. number: CS 9081.

31 Atlantic, 1967, Ref. number: SD 8139.

19

Redding in 1965, which, however, consecrated Aretha as the queen of

soul: “what most of them did not realize is that the song was really

written by a man -Otis Redding- two years before Aretha ever sang it.

Otis released the song as a single on August 15, 1965, as his message

to his wife” (Eggerichs, 2004: 47).

Nina Simone. A great fighter for civil rights, her discography included

blues, jazz and soul. After the death of Martin Luther King, Nina went

into self-imposed exile in France, where she died in 2003. Some of her

most notable albums were Forbidden Fruit,32 from 1961, I Put A Spell

On You,33 from 1965, Wild Is The Wind34 and High Priestess Of Soul,35

from 1966 and 1967, as well as Black Gold,36 released in 1969.

In the same vein, Sam Cooke also spread the music that accompanied

the civil rights struggle of the African-American community in some

way. Cooke began singing gospel in The Soul Stirrers, developing a

meteoric solo career that earned him fame within the black pop genre

that emerged from gospel. His output included songs such as “You Send

Me”,37 released in 1957, “The Wonderful World of Sam Cooke”,38

“Chain Gang”,39 from 1960, and “A Change is Gonna Come”,40

released posthumously in 1963, shortly after his assassination. This

piece has become one of the masterpieces of soul music of the early

sixties: “in it we can hear the phrase: “living is too hard, but I'm afraid

to die”, as a chilling posthumous message” (López Poy, 2014: 68). In

many of Sam Cooke's hits, the responsorial texture between soloist and

choir can also be appreciated, a resource with clear African roots that

was less common in the white pop music of the time. Thus, in songs

like “Chain gang”, “Having a party”, “Bring it on home to me”41 or

“Twistin' the night away”,42 there is a nod to the African roots of white

32 Colpix records, 1961, Ref. number: SCP 419.

33 Philips, 1965, Ref. number: PHS 600-172.

34 Philips, 1966, Ref. number: PHS 600-217.

35 Philips, 1966, Ref. number: PHS 600-219.

36 RCA Victor, 1970, Ref. number: LSP 4248.

37 Keen, 1957, Ref. number: 34013.

38 Keen, 1960, Ref. number: 86106.

39 RCA Victor, 1960, Ref. number: 47-7783.

40 RCA Victor, 1964, Ref. number: 47-8486.

41 RCA Victor, 1962, Ref. number: 47-8036.

42 RCA Victor, 1962, Ref. number: LPM-2555.

20

pop music, a nod to the call-and-response style so common in African-

rooted religious music.

Ray Charles, for his part, began to mix secular lyrics with sacred music

as early as 1949. In 1951 he released his first big hit: “Baby, Let Me

Hold Your Hand”,43 a synthesis of rhythm and blues, gospel and jazz

music that laid the foundations of soul music. After signing with the

Atlantic label, Ray Charles began to record in the mid-fifties songs such

as “Mess Around”, “Kiss Me Baby”, “Hallelujah I Love Her So” and

“I Got A Woman”,44 a mixture of gospel and blues that consecrated the

soul genre as a new musical style, differentiated from the other rhythm

and blues genres, although indebted to all of them. From 1959 onwards

came the accolades thanks to works such as The Genious Of Ray

Charles,45 from 1959, and Ray Charles in Person,46 from 1960. During

1962 Ray Charles fused pop and country music in his compositions,

resulting in such original albums as Modern Sounds In Country And

Western.47 His musical style drifted towards country, black pop, jazz

and rhythm and blues, further proof of the versatility that this African-

American musician achieved and which helped “Georgia On My

Mind”48 to be adopted as the official anthem of the State of Georgia,

one of the many honors that the leading pioneer of soul music would

receive during his lifetime.

Despite the importance of the work of these two musicians in the birth

of the soul style, the real person responsible for reshaping rhythm and

blues and revolutionizing soul was James Brown, an African-American

artist who took this musical genre from the spiritual and melodic shelter

of gospel to the choppy rhythms of funk. When he was only twenty

years old, and after spending three years in prison, James Brown joined

a gospel group called The Starlighters, a group that Brown converted

into a soul band under the name of The Famous Flames. With The

Famous Flames, Brown had his first hit, “Please, Please, Please”49 in

1956. Other songs followed, such as “Try Me”50 in 1959, and the album

43 Swing Time Records, 1951, Ref. number: 250A.

44 Atlantic, 1957, Ref. number: 8006.

45 Atlantic, 1959, Ref. number: SD 1312.

46 Atlantic, 1960, Ref. number: SD 8039.

47 ABC-Paramount, 1962, Ref. number: ABC-410.

48 ABC-Paramount, 1960, Ref. number: 45-10135.

49 Federal Records, 1956, Ref. number: 45-12258.

50 King Records, 1959, Ref. number: 635.

21

Live At The Apollo51 in 1962. It was around 1965, however, that James

Brown began to introduce syncopated rhythms, percussive bass and

drum counter-rhythms into his recordings, characteristics that already

heralded the rhythmic revolution that funk music would bring. “Papa’s

Got a Brand New Bag”,52 from 1965, and “Cold Sweat”,53 from 1967,

can be considered the true precursors of the new funk genre.

Although soul became established, in part, thanks to the work of these

three musicians, other singers such as Otis Redding, Al Green, Solomon

Burke and Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions popularized it. In this

way, soul became one of the most important styles of African-American

urban popular music developed during the 1960s.

Endowed with a soul style close to pop, Otis Redding is considered one

of the most popular soul singers among the mid-1960s audiences,

despite his brief musical career. His first single with the Stax label, Hey,

hey baby,54 appeared in 1962, although his definitive consecration

would come with albums such as Otis blue/Otis Redding sings soul,55

from 1965, and Complete & unbelievable...The Otis Redding dictionary

of soul,56 from 1966, both recorded by the Volt label, a subsidiary of

Stax Records. Unfortunately, in December 1967, the plane in which he

was touring with his band, The Bar-Kays, fell into the icy waters of the

Monoma River in Wisconsin, a terrible accident that cut short the life

of one of the most promising soul music artists of the time. His last

single, the ballad “Sittin' on the dock of the bay”,57 was released

posthumously in 1968.

Within a more eclectic musical style, Solomon Burke emerged as the

most versatile soul musician of the 1960s, fusing styles as diverse as

country, gospel and rhythm and blues. His musical beginnings were

with the Atlantic Records company, for which he recorded some

country music singles in 1960, including the song “Just out of reach”.58

51 Kings Records, 1963, Ref. number: 826.

52 Kings Records, 1965, Ref. number: 938.

53 Kings Records, 1967, Ref. number: 1020.

54 Volt, 1962, Ref. number: 103.

55 Volt, 1965, Ref. number: 412.

56 Volt, 1966, Ref. number: 415.

57 Volt, 1968, Ref. number: 419.

58 Atlantic, 1961, Ref. number: 45-2114.

22

Later, and within the soul music orbit, he recorded “Cry to me”,59 in

1961; “Home in your heart”,60 in 1962; “Goodbye baby”,61 in 1964, and

“If you need me”62 in 1963. In this way, Solomon Burke's overflowing

and emotional style left a deep impression on other soul musicians of

the time.

Al Green boasted a melodious voice in a cooler musical style, a trait we

can relate to the work of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding. Like Sam

Cooke, Al Green came from the world of gospel music, which made

him, given his elegance and vocal quality, a direct heir to the soul style

of both singers. Some of his most important albums include Al Green

gets next to you,63 from 1971; Let's stay together,64 released in 1972;

Call me,65 in 1973 and, later, The belle album,66 released in 1977.

Within this same period, other authors deserve to be mentioned, such

as Wilson Pickett, known for songs like “Mustang Sally”; Fontella

Bass, with “Rescue Me”; Roberta Flack, with “Killing Me Softly With

This Song”; Sam and Dave, with “Hold On I`m Coming”; Marvin Gaye

with “What’s Going On”; Gloria Gaynor with “I Will Survive”; Donny

Hathaway with “Everything is Everything”; Curtis Mayfield with

“Move On Up” and Steve Wonder with “Superstition”, among others.

Rhythm and Blues Arrives in Europe: Rhythm and Blues in Spanish

Popular Music During Franco’s Developmentalist Period

In the early 1950s, Spain was slowly beginning to integrate into the

liberal democracies of the West thanks to the external legitimization

that the political regime imposed by General Francisco Franco was

experiencing. Spain's entry into the WHO in 1951, the ILO in 1955, the

signing of the Concordat with the Vatican in 1953 and its entry into the

international monetary fund (IMF) in 1957 were some of the

59 Atlantic, 1962, Ref. number: 45-2131.

60 Atlantic, 1963, Ref. number: 45-2180.

61 Atlantic, 1964, Ref. number: 45-2226.

62 Atlantic, 1963, Ref. number: SD-8085.

63 Hi Records, 1971, Ref. number: SHL 32062.

64 Hi Records, 1972, Ref. number: SHL 32070.

65 Hi Records, 1973, Ref. number: XSHL 32077.

66 Hi Records, 1977, Ref. number: HLP 6004.

23

consequences of an openness that began in September 1953 with the

signing of the Madrid Pacts between the Eisenhower and Franco

governments. The arrival of the long-awaited American aid led to the

appearance in Spain of urban popular music genres similar to those

developed in the Anglo-Saxon world, a fact helped by the establishment

of military bases in Torrejón de Ardoz, Zaragoza, Rota and Morón de

la Frontera and the frequent exchanges between soldiers and the civilian

population. Likewise, the establishment of radio stations broadcasting

blues, jazz and rock 'n roll music from the bases, and the establishment

of Radio Liberty on the beach at Pals, in the province of Gerona, helped

to popularize the values of American popular music among Spaniards.

The socio-cultural transformations that resulted from political openness

affected the development of Spanish popular urban music from the late

1950s onwards, transformations that were based on genres such as

rock'n roll, blues and the different styles that made up rhythm and blues:

gospel-pop and soul-pop. The consecration of these musical styles in

Spain was sustained by the development of rock'n roll in its various

ramifications, which gave a halo of modernity to the rhythms that had

been heard in Spain up to that time.

It is important to highlight, in this sense, the importance that certain

American companies had in the development of Spanish rhythm and

blues. In fact, the close relationship of some managers with the Franco

regime led to personalities such as James A. Farley receiving various

awards during the 1950s. Thus, according to Iván Iglesias: “Its [Coca-

Cola] president, a vehement anti-communist, visited Spain for the first

time in 1948 and had regular meetings with General Franco. In 1955 he

received the decoration of the Order of Isabella the Catholic” (Iglesias,

2017: 278). Specifically, the recipient, James A. Farley, was a former

US Minister of Communications and, at the time, Chairman of the

Board of Directors of the Coca-Cola Export Corporation.

The ABC newspaper of 1 April 1955 reported on the award to James

Farley:

On the occasion of Victory Day, the Head of State has awarded the

following decorations:

[...] Encomienda de Número: a D. Jaime Suárez Morales, Undersecretary

of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador; D. James Farley, former

Minister of Communications of the United States of America; Don

24

Francisco Aguilar Villacorta, Counsellor of the Embassy of El Salvador

in Mexico [...] (ABC, 1-04-1955: 33).

Probably due to this close situation of cultural exchange between the

two nations, in 1956 the Columbia record company recorded in Spain

an EP with serial number CGE 60148 on which the latest hits by Bill

Haley and his Comets67 could be heard. Thus, along with the track

“Rock around the clock” -next to which, on the cover, one could read:

“Al compás del reloj”- appeared “Birth of the boogie”, “Thirteen

women” and “Mambo rock”. The record represented a first recording

incursion into the work of the most important North American rock'n

roll artists in our country, a phenomenon that would continue thanks to

the arrival of rock'n roll cover albums sung in Spanish by Mexican and

Cuban groups such as Los Teen Tops, Los Llopis and Los Locos del

Ritmo.

As we can appreciate, and despite the bad press that the film for which

it served as soundtrack, The Wild One, had earned in the Western media,

“Rock around the clock” was introduced in the Spanish record market

little more than a year after its commercialization in North America. In

fact, due to the enormous success of this record, Bill Haley and his

Comets came to Spain to give several performances in Barcelona and

Madrid during the month of November 1958. The reaction of the

Barcelona public led to the cancellation of the planned concerts, due to

the government suspension signed by the Civil Government. In the ABC

newspaper of 23 November 1958, one could read:

The governmental authority suspended the modern music festival with

the performance of the creator of «Rock and Roll», Bill Haley,

announced for tonight and tomorrow night, in the Palacio Municipal de

los Deportes, as a consequence of the acts of «hooliganism» registered

in the first performance last night, in which the public forces had to

intervene (ABC, 23-11-1958: 97).

The note provided by the civil government stated: “The show given

yesterday at the Palacio Municipal de los Deportes, which had not been

authorized by the Civil Government, has been suspended by the

67 “Number one in the US, here it is presented as an EP with four different covers. The

content is the same - 'Rock around the clock', 'Birth of the boogie', 'Thirteen women'

and 'Mambo rock' - but the covers show a music stand with the artist's name on one

of them, two similar covers in different colours with the image of a trumpeter and a

saxophonist or a last one with dancers” (Faulín, 2015: 394-395).

25

government and banned throughout the province of Barcelona” (ABC,

23-11-1958: 97).

Despite the prohibition of certain popular urban music activities, such

as Bill Haley's concerts in Barcelona or, later, the Matinees at Madrid's

Circo Price, Spanish rock'n roll and rhythm and blues did not suffer

particularly from the effects of government censorship during its early

years, at least not to the extent of other artistic manifestations. The

behavior that this music provoked among young people was a cause for

reproach on the part of the authorities, at whose service certain

conservative sectors of the Spanish press worked, openly criticizing the

loss of values among adolescents.

Therefore, and independently of the strict control that the Ministry of

Information and Tourism exercised over cultural events, rhythm and

blues music was able to spread normally in Spain in the late 1950s, both

through radio stations and record companies, and with the records of

the first Spanish groups that made its development possible. The slow

evolution of the first recordings by these groups can be attributed, rather

than to a consequence of political censorship, to the economic shortages

and the technical backwardness that existed in our country in those

years. The scarcity of record players and the lack of interest in the

English language in large sectors of a rural society that was beginning

to emigrate to the cities in search of better living conditions, can be

considered as the main obstacles that delayed the development of

Spanish rhythm and blues. This fact circumscribed, at first, the new

urban popular music to the student and university environments of the

country's big cities.

Thus, throughout the 1960s, the records began to be heard on the radio

stations of the American bases established on Spanish soil, and were

broadcast at nightclubs and on Spanish music radio programs such as

Boite, Discomanía, Caravana and El Gran Musical, a circumstance that

helped the emergence of the first Spanish rhythm and blues bands. The

hit parades that appeared in the music magazines dedicated to urban

popular music, which began to be published timidly in the late fifties

and early sixties, also contributed to their development. In this sense,

publications such as Mosaico Musical, Discóbolo, Fans or Fonorama

by José Luis Álvarez, a publication entirely dedicated to the young

Spanish music of the time, stand out. Some of the first pioneering

Spanish groups emerged, such as Los Estudiantes, Los Pájaros Locos,

26

Mimo y Los Jump, Los Teleko, Los Sonor, Los 4 Jets, Los Relámpagos,

Los Pekenikes, Los Flaps, Los Rocking Boys, Los Continentales, Micky

y Los Tonys, Bruno y sus rockeros, Los Diapasons, Los Rockets, Alex y

Los Findes, Los Giovanes, Los X5, Los Brisks, Los Ágaros or El Dúo

Dinámico, among others, and soloists of authentic rock inspiration such

as Kurt Savoy, Rocky Kan, Baby, Nelo, Gavy Sander's or Chico Valento.

The musical references of these early Spanish groups revolved around

American and British rhythm and blues, rock'n roll, gospel-pop and

soul-pop soloists and bands of the stature of The Shadows, Cliff

Richard, The Drifters, The Platters, Little Eva, The Four Tops, The

Gladiolas, The Everly Brothers, The Kingston Trio, Johnny and The

Hurricanes, The Ventures, The Pacifics, The Tornados, Elvis Presley,

Ricky Nelson, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochram, Ray Charles and many

more. In this sense, the versions that Spanish groups performed of many

of the songs by the artists mentioned give an approximate idea of the

important role that popular urban music from North America and Great

Britain played in the consecration of Spanish popular urban music

during the 1960s. Thus, after the first stutters that the pioneering groups

made in “talking magazines”, modern music festivals and nightclubs, a

period of creative explosion began after the visit of the British group

The Beatles to Spain on 2 and 3 July 1965. From that moment on, the

merseybeat and rhythm and blues sounds were definitively established

within the style of the most important Spanish bands of the mid-decade.

Thus, the Spanish band Los Bravos inherited the sound and expressive

force of British rhythm and blues groups such as The Rollings Stones or

The Spencer Davis Group, while Los Brincos became a sort of Spanish

version of Beatle, with their Seseña layers, their lyrics sung in English

and a clearly British-inspired merseybeat sound.

Meanwhile, the energy of Afro-American soul and gospel music

filtered into the style of bands such as Los Grimm, with Pedro Ruy-Blas

on vocals, Conexion, Pop Tops and Los Canarios. For their part, Los

Canarios with their album entitled Ciclos and Los Módulos with

Realidad opened the path of Spanish symphonic and progressive rock,

a path that was developed by other groups such as Smash, Triana, Pan

y Regaliz or Máquina!

In relation to the birth of Spanish rhythm and blues, in the interview we

conducted in 2017 with Pedro Ruy Blas, one of the main Spanish

27

rhythm and blues singers, who began his musical career during the

second half of the sixties in bands such as Los Grimm, it was stated:

José Ignacio González Mozos: Your musical references

came more from rhythm and blues than from the pop-rock that

was emerging at that time in Spain. Could you talk about what

were your direct musical influences in those sixties?

Pedro Ruy Blas: I have been fortunate to have received from

nature a fairly extensive vocal tessitura, which has allowed

me, and fortunately still does, to emit notes ranging from quite

high-pitched to those of a baritone. At a decisive moment in

my pre-adolescence, for a little over two years, I had the

privilege of being able to listen intensively every day to an

endless number of American songs and singers, something

which at that age could be considered a vital influence on my

later development. Now many of those staples are referred to

as doo-wop. For me, however, they are simply the beginning

of the glorious beginning of rhythm and blues, although I not

only listened to the basics produced by African-American

artists, but also by great white artists, although it is true that I

acquired a special empathy for black artists, which would

later manifest itself in the way I played, once rhythm and

blues and soul made their irresistible appearance, permeating

the whole world with that music. I was able to put into

practice what I had assimilated in the second period of groups

like Los Grimm, or Los Brisks, and with greater intensity

during my time as singer of Los Canarios, an unbeatable

group dedicated entirely to that musical style at that time.

José Ignacio González Mozos: If I'm not mistaken, around

1967 you made an interesting trip to the United States where

you got to know first-hand the urban popular music of North

America. What differences did you find between what was

being done in Spain in relation to rhythm and blues and soul

music during the sixties and the musical product that was

being consumed in North America during those years?

Pedro Ruy Blas: Actually, that stay in New York was a very

intense experience, albeit brief, which meant that I realised

that what I wanted most at that time was to sing rhythm and

blues, feeling ready for it. It then became clear that those years

in which I listened to and enjoyed that form of performing had

left a very deep impression on me. Obviously this was not

28

something common in other singers and musicians who were

not able to enjoy such valuable information as in my case, and

yet another, precisely at a time of life such as adolescence,

when music, cinema, literature, politics and many other

aspects related to art, culture and society can leave an

important mark, shaping a certain personality.

José Ignacio González Mozos: “typical Spanish” soul began

to fill Spanish nightclubs and discotheques in the late 1960s.

When you joined the group Los Grimm, I imagine that you

tried to adapt the original soul that came from North America

to Spanish tastes. How would you describe your musical

passage through bands like Los Grimm, Los Brisks and later

Los Canarios and the way soul music was experienced in

Spain at that time?

Pedro Ruy Blas: From my point of view there was never a

“typical Spanish” soul. There were only two types of groups

or singers; those who did it well, with conviction, quality and

professionalism, very few by the way, and on the other hand,

a vast majority who were very bad, without soul, without

“swing”, musicians with hardly any personality who used

some of those songs just to jump on a bandwagon that was in

fashion at the time, making it painful to listen to them. It could

be that the latter were the ones who really deserved the

somewhat dubious and pejorative title of “typical Spanish”,

which is usually associated with shoddiness and/or

mediocrity. To beach bar music to conquer Swedish women,

to summer bands for undemanding audiences and to the

majority of artists whose only intention in making music is to

make a lot of money as soon as possible, providing a good cut

for sharks lurking around, disguised as entertainment. My

experience in those groups you mention were decisive,

unforgettable for me and, in them, I began to become a man

and to understand the meaning and responsibility of being an

artist.

José Ignacio González Mozos: In 1970 you began your solo

career, a time when government censorship would attack

some of your recordings, specifically the version of “I am a

Preacher” that you recorded under the title “Mi voz es amor”,

a heart-wrenching gospel-pop that overwhelms with its

expressive intensity. I imagine that singing to those who are

“executioners in their own law” must not have gone down

29

well in certain government circles. Could you explain your

relationship with censorship in those final years of Franco's

regime?

Pedro Ruy Blas: Bad. I don't think there is anyone who was

censored who was happy to be so. Perhaps even less so for

political reasons. In such cases, censorship tends to be

destructive, and not simply a reprimand, a warning to make

the censured repent and mend their ways in the future after a

minor prank that is nothing more than a slap on the wrist, or

having to remain kneeling facing the wall for an entire

religion class. Political censorship has serious consequences,

and can completely cut short the future of a career, of a good

start. One of its worst reprisals can be even more damaging

than censorship itself. This is self-censorship, because once it

is initially carried out and decreed by the highest authority, it

spreads like an epidemic, infecting each and every one of the

operators who, out of their own interest, affection or fear of

the censor, become executors, the long arm of punishment,

placing themselves at his service with caution, ...lest ....... But

now it doesn't matter. It is water under the bridge. The worst

thing is to see that censorship is also exercised in times of

peace, of democracy, of «freedom», as it seems to be inherent

to the human condition and wherever there is power, there

will be some form of censorship (Fragment of the interview

with Pedro Ruy Blas on 4-12-2017).

For his part, Luis Cobos, another of the great Spanish musicians who

cultivated rhythm and blues and soul in Spain in the late sixties and

early seventies, stated in the interview we conducted with him in 2017:

José Ignacio González Mozos: For some, soul music arrived

in Spain around 1966 thanks to the agreement that RCA made

with Motown to distribute their records in our country,

although even before that, at the beginning of the sixties, you

could listen to Marv Johnson. Others claim that soul music

was popularised in Spain thanks to a musical jingle used by

TVE, which was none other than Soul Finger by the Bar-

Kays. Could you tell us about your personal experience with

soul music in Spain in the sixties and the reason that led you

to embark on the great project that was Conexion, as a

musician, arranger and composer, just at a time when

progressive and psychedelic music was beginning to take off

30

in large parts of the country, such as Madrid, Catalonia and

Andalusia?

Luis Cobos: My love of soul comes from the fact that soul

music, which is nourished by gospel, rhythm & blues, doo-

wop and some other genres, brings together all the qualities of

instrumental and choral music, which is what I have liked and

like the most, and also includes the melodic and rhythmic

voice: the combination of many instruments and voices. Soul,

in addition, has rhythm, it's hiphotic (it has hiccups (jumps) in

the voice, the choirs, the percussion and the metal and string

phrases. It is a vibrant and very emotional music and although

it has its rules, it allows for variation without fundamentally

altering the song or the message. It comes from 1950 to '67

and extends beyond, until the great singers of the genre have

continued to cultivate it and to evolve into other sub-genres

heavily influenced by soul.

The great rock and pop groups have been influenced by soul.

The instrumentations move and are perceived as relays and all

of them, being part of a whole, have strength and musical

value by themselves. A marvel.

In soul, strings are also included and are handled as a soft and

warm wind, sometimes, and with energy at other times, which

floats the themes or stirs them up. It is a great lesson in the

behavior and collaboration of the instrumental sections in the

service of a melody and text that can be varied without

altering the song in a way that changes the content or the

message. The choirs reinforce the voice and complement it,

taking the harmonized melody, while the voice can improvise

or phrase around the melody, always supported by the choirs,

the strings or the brass. The rhythm section is forceful and

resounding. It's a perfect combination. That's why I was

captivated by soul and am still captivated by this amazing

music.

Of course, I discovered soul because it became fashionable

but I didn't join the style because it was the prevailing trend

but because I fell into its nets. It simply grabbed me because

of its beauty and the emotional power it gives off.

I didn't want to get started and join the genre, dragging

Conexion into it, but it happened, influenced by the strength

and inspiration of songs like: Sweet soul music, This is a

“men's world”, “Respect”, “Sittin' on the dock of the bay”,

“My girl” and many others... and I had no trouble sharing that

fascination with the rest of the group. And so Conexion

31

embarked on the soul revolution of the late sixties and early

seventies.

José Ignacio González Mozos: According to my

information, Conexion signed in 1969 for the record label

Movieplay. Do you think this was an important milestone in

the band's career to reach the top of the charts in our country?

How was the relationship with the record labels in those

years? Was there usually total freedom when it came to

making musical arrangements and choosing the songs or, on

the contrary, the bands had to conform to the commercial

canons established by the companies? What was your

personal experience?

Luis Cobos: Signing with Movieplay was a good thing

because Carlos Guitart, a cultured and very well-informed

man who loved American music and was very fond of folk

and soul, was the artistic director of that label, so we were

lucky because we were able to start our journey without major

obstacles, problems or impositions of repertoire to record.

We recorded a first single containing “Strong lover” and

“West soul”, two songs composed by me, without being asked

for any reference or previous proof.

Just before we started recording, we received a call from

Alain Mihaud, producer of Los Bravos, Los Canarios and Los

Pop-tops, asking for an audition to evaluate us. We gave it to

him at the Club Paraninfo, a discotheque where groups like

the ones described above and others usually performed.

Mr. Milhaud, very respected at that time for being French,

representative of the Barclay record company and the most

important producer of international hits, listened to Conexion,

live and exclusively. We played about four songs, after which

he told me that he accepted us as a group to be produced by

him and managed by Barclay's office in Augusto Figueroa

Street in Madrid.

I talked to him for about thirty minutes and I didn't tell him

that a few days earlier I had signed a recording contract with

Movieplay, which, coincidentally, was the record company

that distributed Barclay and Alain Milhaud's productions.

A few days later I told him that I had accepted the offer that

Movieplay had sent us and that we could not be produced by

him. He told me that he would then take us on as manager. In

fact, that is how it was for about six months, after which we

32

left his tutelage, by mutual agreement, and went our own way

with other management offices.

At Movieplay we did very well and I think this influenced our

initial success. On that label there was also a very good and

successful folk group called Nuestro pequeño mundo, with

whom I worked as arranger and musician and whose singers

Pat and Laura recorded backing vocals on our records, along

with Cecilia who also participated in some backing vocal

recordings.

There was a very good atmosphere and we shared our taste

for folk and soul and for modern and classical choral music.

Later, with success came the record company's interest in

helping us to “orientate” our songs and direct them towards a

more commercial field, and the freedom to decide on the

songs to record was shared, as in many other cases of groups

and singers, although I never had direct pressure, but the

record company gradually imposed itself.

I approached gospel music and Conexion with me, because I

like choral music very much, and we recorded Harmony in

English and Spanish, which was a great success, because it is

a song that speaks of harmony between human beings,

solidarity, joining forces and humanism. Then I composed the

song “Children of Eden” in the same choral gospel genre,

attracted by the good results of Harmony. And continuing in

the same style, we recorded the chorus of the gospel opera:

Prepare ye the way of the lord, also in English and Spanish. I

added a verse of lyrics and music to this song to make it into

a theme, as it was initially just a refrain. I was given

permission by the authors and the publisher and it was a very

appreciated and successful song.

Yes, there were some conditions imposed by formula radio

and by the people and teams that governed the formula radio

stations, where hit records were consolidated. It mattered a lot

that the radio station rated a song as a red record, since at that

time the daily plays were numerous and helped it to climb the

charts and become a hit. Despite all these conditioning

factors, Conexión was one of the first groups to record a long

song composed by me, called “Concierto uno”, 20 minutes

long, which occupies an entire side of the LP Harmony,

recorded and released in 1973, and we had no problem with

Movieplay to record it in one go in the studio, as if it were

live, and that's how we left it (excerpt from the interview with

Luis Cobos on 23-10-2017).

33

Taking these documents into account, we can say that many of the

Spanish pop groups of the 1960s developed their style around rhythm

and blues music. In fact, some bands such as Los Buenos, whose

members included the British organist Rod Mayall, Los Gatos Negros

or Lone Star divided their discography between blues, rhythm and

blues, soul and even jazz, something that was not alien to the

discography of the rest of the Spanish groups. Despite the large number

of Spanish bands in this style, we will comment, by way of

representation, on the rhythm and blues discography of three of the

great Spanish bands of the time: Los Bravos, Los Canarios and Los Pop

Tops.

The group Los Bravos was born in 1965 from the fusion of two bands:

Los Sonor and Mike and The Runaways. From Los Sonor, Tony

Martínez on guitar and Manolo Fernández on keyboards joined the new

line-up, while from Los Runaways came singer Michael Kogel, better

known as Mike Kennedy, and drummer Pablo Sanllehi. Regarding the

way in which the merger of the two groups took place and the

prominence and conflictive nature of the new singer Mike Kogel, the

director of CBS and Sony Music Spain, Manolo Díaz, ex-member of Los

Sonor and composer and arranger of many of the songs that made them

famous, commented on the following anecdote:

Los Runaways and Los Sonor merged into a single group and adopted

the name Los Sonor. Then they came to Madrid and Manolo, who played

the keyboards, the organ at that time more than anything else, called me

and told me that they had joined this group where there was a German

singer who he thought was fantastic but who was a very complicated

guy, very difficult, an anarchist, a man who was not at all disciplined,

who was constantly getting into trouble, who stole fruit from the fruit

shops, who stole from the department stores and was always on the

prowl. In other words, he was a tremendous case, in fact, he asked me to

go and see him, because he was already convinced that this guy had to

be removed from the group. And both Tony and Manolo sent me to go

to a club that I don't remember the name of at the moment, which I think

was on Paseo de las Delicias, where Los Sonor with Mike Kennedy and

Pablo and Miguel, who called them Los Runaways with Mike, were

working there for money. So, I saw that group perform there and,

evidently, Mike Kennedy was effectively a kind of savage, in a way he

would burp into the microphone and put more echo, so the burping went

on for a long time, burping and other kinds of noises that we're not going

to mention. It was a provocation what he was doing, but, yes, he sang

fantastically well, and he was also a star, he was a man who, with those

screams he made, was something very different, a kind of very young

34

Tom Jones, very wild, very strong, who barked and at the same time had

a great voice. So when they finished the performance, Manolo and Tony

came to see me: «Well, what do you think of this... is this guy crazy?«

And I told them: «Boy, maybe he's crazy, but I think that if you have any

chance in your life of having a big international success and becoming

famous, it's with this guy» (Arteseros, La Puerta Verde I, 61 min 52 s).

This, then, was the cocktail of success for Los Bravos: a diligent and

powerful manager, Alain Milhaud, a competent composer and member

of the Columbia record label, Manolo Díaz, and a charismatic singer

with a perfect command of the English language, Mike Kogel, whose

stage name was Mike Kennedy.

On the occasion of the presentation of Los Bravos on 13 March 1966 at

the Teatro de Zarzuela in Madrid, Discóbolo magazine, in issue 97,

noted:

Barely six months ago we heard for the first time at Nicca's a German

boy whose voice possessed the characteristic strength and tear of Tom

Jones and Mick Jagger, but with the particularity that he sang in higher

tones than the two aforementioned «monsters» of the disco world [...].

On 13 March, Los Bravos -the name with which the «musicals»

christened the group made up of Tony, Manolo, Pablo, Juan y Junior and

Michel- gave a ninety-minute recital at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in

Madrid, which for the second time tore its garments to make way for

popular music. Twenty songs were performed without interruption.

From the greatest hits of The Animals, Rolling Stones and The Beatles,

to the new compositions of Manolo Díaz, soul of Los Bravos and author

of the Spanish songs they perform. «I'm crying», «Day Tripper», «We

gotta get out of this place», «Extasy», «Don't let me misunderstood»,

«Quiero gritar», «No sé mi nombre» and, above all, «It's not unusual»,

which got the «musicals» off their seats [...] Michel, the leader of the

group, was the great attraction of the recital. His naturalness and

friendliness were evident on several occasions, such as when he stuck

his head through the curtains to say hello, or when he threw the

aeroplanes he had made with the hand programmes to the audience

(Discóbolo, 1-04-1966: 57).

After the presentation of the group, Los Bravos recorded their first

single for the Columbia label, which included two songs, “It's not

unusual”, on side A, and “No sé mi nombre”,68 on side B. The single

was released with notable success at the beginning of 1966, a preamble

to the enormous popularity the group would achieve in the following

years. With the possibility of a more than feasible international success

68 Columbia, 1966, Ref. number: S.S. 44-1966

35

for the band in mind, Alain Milhaud went to London to deal with the

Decca record company. The agreement reached by Columbia España's

management with Decca would allow them to publish and distribute the

Spanish group's recording in the UK, all in exchange, obviously, for a

substantial share for the English, represented by Phil Solomon. The

recording was to be made in London and the tracks prepared by the

arranger provided by Decca, Ivor Raymonde. To this end, a series of

sketches were taken to Madrid to choose the ones that best suited the

group. Finally, “Black is black” was chosen as the star song and Los

Bravos travelled to England to record it at the Decca studios in London.

In the interview that the music magazine Discóbolo conducted with Ivor

Raymonde during his stay in Madrid in April 1966, the British arranger

said:

-Question: Mr. Raymonde, what is the reason for your trip to

Spain?

-Ivor Raymonde: Decca sent me to prepare the orchestral

arrangements for the recording that Los Bravos will make in

London at the end of this month. I have also brought some

unreleased English songs for them to record (Discóbolo, 1-

04-1966: 49).

For his part, Alain Milhaud, who was the manager of Los Bravos and

an executive of the Columbia company in those years, in an interview

with Concha Velasco, told some remarkable details of the recording for

Decca in London:

-Concha Velasco: You were the producer of «Black is

black», which is fifty years since it was recorded. A recording

that was made in London, wasn't it?

-Alain Milhaud: Yes, in the Decca studios.

-Concha Velasco: It is said that only Mike and Tony were

there, is that true?

-Alain Milhaud: That's true. Well, I didn't do it. Who had the

responsibility for the recording at that time was the Decca

company, who recommended me a manager who was a

legendary director of a pirate radio station called Radio

Caroline, and when I presented the demos and records of Los

Bravos to Solomon, he told me: «I'm interested in this group».

This has been the principle that has allowed Los Bravos to

have the success they have had in Spain.

-Concha Velasco: The song wasn't by Los Bravos, was it?

36

-Alain Milhaud: No. The song was by three young London

composers Grainger, Hayes and Wadey. When Decca,

supported by Solomon, decided to sign Los Bravos, they sent

one of Decca's artistic directors who came to Madrid with

about twenty-five demos that we listened to in a room [...] Ivor

Raymonde and I then decided to record «Black is black».69

Tony Martínez, the guitarist of Los Bravos, also talked about the

reasons why the group recorded in London and other details of that

1966 album:

In England at that time, in a way, it was the absolute vanguard of what

music was. We were getting English music and we were freaking out, so

the only thing we could do was to go to England in order to be successful

in that country. In Spain, I suppose that at that time there were qualified

studios to make those recordings, the only thing was that of everybody

who recorded in Spain, nobody had really worked internationally and,

curiously, with regard to this group, there were a number of people who

were very interested and very involved in the project who decided that

the group should go to England to record. Curiously, the band didn't

record, that's another different anecdote, others recorded for the band

because of external provocation, that is, there were some rules within the

union in England, we showed up, which was very funny because we

showed up with our little guitars there very excited thinking that we were

going to enter the studio, Keith Sullivan replaced me in most of the

recordings that The Bravos group made there, I only remember the guitar

player because he was the basic element in which I had to intervene.

Curiously, he also learned something from me and it was a series of

interesting anecdotes within the projection of the songs that had a certain

Spanish accent, so my projection as a guitarist was identified then, 20

years ago. Consequently, the recordings were made in England for the

sole reason of reliability. From then on, all the trade was established from

there and from there it was projected to Spain, and in Spain there was

success thanks perhaps to that foreign anecdote (Arteseros, La Puerta

Verde I, 64 min).

This was the way the recording was made, a work in which the

protagonists were not the musicians of the band Los Bravos, but English

session musicians provided by the Decca company and totally unrelated

to Los Bravos, led for that special occasion by Mike Kennedy. In any

case, the single: Black is black/No sé mi nombre (I want a name),70 also

marketed by Decca for the international market with the songs “Black

69

Retrieved from: http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/cine-de-barrio/cine-barrio-

chicos-chicas/3631318/. [Consulted 3-12-2021].

70 Columbia, 1966, Ref. number: 453-1966.

37

is black/Sympathy”, was a notable success in the English and North

American markets, and there was even a French version, “Noir c`est

noir”, performed by the French rocker Johnny Hallyday. In Spain the

success was extraordinary, a fact that catapulted the group to the

pinnacle of fame after only a year of existence, quite an achievement

for an almost unknown Spanish rhythm and blues group.

Rhythm and blues bass line by «Black is black». [Transcribed by José Ignacio

González Mozos]

The group's second single in the English market, I don't care/Don't be

left out in the cold, was not as successful as “Black is black”. Other

singles and EPs followed for the Spanish market with songs that had a

certain popularity, such as “Bring a little loving” (1966), “La moto”

(1966), “Going nowhere” (1966), “Los chicos con las chicas” (1967),

the álbum: Dame un poco de amor (1968) or “Love is a symphony”71

(1968), a romantic ballad accompanied by symphonic orchestra in a

different style to their previous works.

With the 1969 album: Ilustrísimos Bravos, and after the suicide of the

keyboardist, Manolo Fernández, and the departure of Mike Kennedy

from the group, the band ended up disappearing in 1970 in the face of

the rise of new musical trends such as psychedelia and progressive rock,

which were gaining more and more ground among the tastes of young

Spaniards.

Another prominent Spanish group that cultivated pop-soul and gospel-

pop music, occasionally embellished by the colors of European baroque

music, was Los Pop Tops. The importance of this Spanish band lay in

their ability to project, together with Los Canarios, popular urban music

with Afro-American roots beyond our borders, thanks to songs such as

“Mamy blue” and “The voice of the dying man”.

The Pop Tops began their musical career in 1965 under the name of Los

Tifones, a group that evolved from the Merseybeat sound of the middle

of the decade to a pop-soul-rhythm and blues with musical overtones

71 Columbia, 1968, Ref. number: MO 481.

38

coming from the European baroque. In 1968, thanks to the

incorporation of Trinidad and Tobago singer Phil Trim, The Pop Tops

began their personal artistic transformation by performing a Spanish

version of the song “A whiter shade of pale”, by the British group

Procol Harum. The song was entitled “Con su blanca palidez”,72 and

was very well received by the Spanish public. Their next album, the

gospel-pop entitled “Oh Lord, why Lord”,73 was presented in

November 1968. This work meant for the group the first place in the

Spanish charts and a notable success in the North American market,

where the rhythm and blues singer Brooke Benton performed his own

version of Pop Tops song. The music was based on the Canon by the

German baroque composer and organist Johann Pachelbel, and the

lyrics were a plea against racial segregation and oppression, premises

that also gave the work weight among a sector of the Spanish population

that identified with the pro-freedom proclamations.

Oh-Lord

Why-Lo-ord

Oh-Lord

Why-

Loo-oo-oord

Typical African-American antiphonal gospel call-and-response structure in “Lord

Why Lord”. [Transcribed by José Ignacio González Mozos]

Thus, after their first successes, the group's fame began to grow, due,

above all, to the daring staging of their live concerts, truly transgressive

for the time and for the political and social situation in Spain at that

time. Probably one of the most complicated situations that this gospel-

pop-soul band experienced took place in the city of Pamplona, during

the Sanfermines, when they went out to perform in their skivvies and

with their bodies tattooed, so that they all seemed to be naked. To top it

all off, Phil Trim, as a foreigner and ignorant of Spain's turbulent past

decades ago, was dressed in a Carlist beret, without knowing what it

represented. The battle was on.

The documentary by Alfonso Arteseros entitled Phil Trim y la música

valenciana, with the participation of Enrique Ginés -presenter of the

programme Discomóder, a programme dedicated to popular urban

music and broadcast since 1961 on Radio popular de Valencia-, Phil

72 Sonoplay, 1967, Ref. number: M. 11098-1967.

73 Sonoplay, 1968, Ref. number: M. 14058-1968.

39

Trim, singer of Los Pop Tops, and Alfonso Arteseros, documentary

maker and manager of Los Pop Tops in that year, dealt with what

happened in Pamplona in 1969:

-Enrique Ginés: There was something with Los Pop Tops

that had a certain repercussion as a scandal, because, I don't

know if it was in Pamplona...

-Alfonso Arteseros: Yes, it was in Pamplona, with Martínez

Dodero (he was who signed them).

-Enrique Ginés: But they performed with naked bodies.

-Arteseros: Indeed, they went out with their bodies, not

naked, but painted, with a slip and the whole body painted.

He (points to Phil Trim) was wearing a beautiful dove of

peace on his chest and there was an altercation. It was in

Pamplona, but it was all because he didn't know anything, he

didn't understand anything, and when they went on stage, it

was the Sanfermines, it was packed with people, wasn't it, and

there was someone who took it and put a red requeté beret on

his head and then he went out there and they almost didn't get

to perform.

-Enrique Ginés: That had a repercussion that at the time

made Pop Tops' popularity a little shaky.

-Arteseros: But that was before “Mamy Blue”.

-Phil Trim: No, but it didn't have any effect on the popularity

of Pop Tops.

-Enrique Ginés: Seen from afar it gave the impression that it

did, didn't it, we were watching it from Valencia and it really

seemed...

-Phil Trim: No, apart from the 200,000 pesetas fine... nothing

else.

-Arteseros: And you had to leave there escorted by the police.

There was one, one of the brass players, they didn't know

where he was and he was lying under the stage. They took

him out in an ambulance (Arteseros, Phil Trim y la música

valenciana, 17 min 22 s).

The eccentricities of Los Pop Tops not only took centre stage in their

live performances, they were also evident in the meetings they held in

their office, located in Madrid's Calle de Jacometrezo. These parties

were remembered with irony by Felipe González, the first president of

the socialist government of Spanish democracy. Alfonso Arteseros

pointed out on this issue:

40

At that time, we had the Los Pop Tops office in Jacometrezo Street, just

around the corner from the Manila cafeteria. Curiously, it was there, in

the Santo Domingo building, that Felipe González, who was still the

labor lawyer Isidoro, had his office at the time. Years later, in Moncloa,

when he was already President of the Government, Felipe told me that

he remembered us, because we were the ones who were responsible for

the police coming to his office and arresting Yáñez. We attracted

attention because we used to ride girls, we had a duck that ran up and

down, who we called Carlofo after Agustín García Carlof, another

member of the group who died recently. Felipe reminded me that we

made a lot of scandals and one day the police ended up going there, and

instead of covering our mouths they took Yánez away. The fact is that

our office was there, where we spent the day, at the end of which we

would have dinner in the area and would inevitably end up in JJ, a

fashionable place at the time (Arteseros, 2011: 236-237).

This was the image radiated by Los Pop Tops, the pioneering Spanish

gospel-soul band that was beginning to find its place in the varied

Spanish music market of the late 1960s.

Continuing with the group's discography, we should point out that in

the same vein as “Oh Lord, why Lord”, Los Pop Tops recorded “The

voice of a dying man” in 1968, a tribute to the recently assassinated

Afro-American leader Martin Luther King. However, despite the depth

of the song, the greatest recognition came in 1971 with “Mamy blue”.

The music was composed by Hubert Giraud, although the English text

was written by Phil Trim and the musical production was by Alain

Milhaud. The problems surrounding the release of “Mamy blue” were

intricate indeed. In the end, despite all the efforts made by Alain

Milhaud to prove that the original of “Mamy blue” belonged to The Pop

Tops, when the song was first marketed in Europe on 15 August 1971,

The Pop Tops' version had to compete with five other versions by

singers of different nationalities. However, the Pop Tops' version

prevailed over the others, reaching number one in most European

popular music hit parades.

The Pop Tops disbanded in 1974, but not before they had successfully

established the gospel-pop and soul-pop style in our country. Phil Trim,

the group's singer, began a solo career at the expense of his manager,

Alfonso Arteseros, but he did not achieve the desired success. His first

solo album was released in 1975 with songs such as “Ceremonia”,74

“Amor de Verano” and versions of “El largo y tortuoso camino”, as

74 Explosion, 1975, Ref. number: E. 34539.

41

well as “Angelitos Negros”. After this failure, Phil Trim's musical

career slowly faded away.

Another important band, Los Canarios, began their musical career as

Los Ídolos in 1961. Its initial members were Teddy Bautista, singer and

rhythm guitar, Germán Pérez, lead guitar, Rafa Izquierdo, bass, and

Tato Lizardo, drums. The music they initially played was rock'n roll

inspired by Merseybeat, which led them to record covers of Beatles

songs, such as “Can’t buy me love”, titled “No puedes comprar mi

amor?”75 or “Hold me Tight”, under the title “Toma mi mano” (Take

my hand). However, from 1964 onwards, their style began to veer

towards African-American based rhythm and blues, a transformation

that intensified during 1965 on the occasion of the US tour that would

take them from South Carolina to New York, when they changed their

name to The Canaries.

On this trip, Teddy discovered the religious music of North America -

gospel and spirituals- which the African-American community

celebrated in Baptist churches, as well as the soul music of Otis Redding

and Wilson Pickett. Teddy Bautista attested to the importance of their

stay in New York in the band's later musical development, as follows:

“Los Canarios had a style, a discourse, that made them sound different

from the others. I think it was our stay in the United States, not anything

else” (Domínguez, 2002: 337).

On the other hand, in the course of an interview, Teddy Bautista

highlighted the enriching musical experiences they had while working

as session musicians at the Brill Building, experiences that had a

definitive influence on the change of musical direction that the band

underwent after their return to Spain at the end of 1966. In relation to

the intense musical experience of the group during their stay in the

United States in the mid-sixties, Teddy Bautista provided the following

information:

We worked in a very famous place called The Brill Building, that's where

Los Tokens had their office and we recorded demos every day in the RCA

studio, which was very close, on 48th Street and the corner [...] We

stayed at the Hotel Victoria, so we would get out of the hotel and walk

straight to the studio. In the studio, one day we found a lot of people there

and the doorman wouldn't let us in. The doorman knew us, we'd been

working there for two weeks, but you can't go in and so on, and everyone

75 Belter, 1964, Ref. number: 51.411.

42

was looking, like, really scared. Finally, one of our producers, Mitch

Margo, who was one of the two Margo brothers from the famous Tokens,

said: come with me. So, we went in and went into one of the checkpoints,

and the checkpoint was connected to the other checkpoints by some fish

tanks, so it was closed and we waited there for most of the morning.

Almost at the end of the morning, we saw the curtains open and it was

like they had finished the session, and we then left the studio to go in,

and when we were leaving we looked back and through the fish tank we

saw Elvis, King Elvis who was the guy who had been recording there all

morning, making some demos with a vocal group called The Foxis, I

don't know what... The emotion was unspeakable, singing into the mics

that he had sung into and all that kind of bullshit. At that time, for

everybody, Elvis was the genesis of the whole movement (Arteseros, La

Puerta Verde I, 56 min 55 s).

The change of direction was marked. On their return to Spain in 1966,

already under the name Los Canarios, the group incorporated a wind

section -trumpet, trombone and saxophone- a transformation that

definitively marked the course of the most important Spanish pop-soul-

rhythm and blues band.

Although they gained some popularity between 1967 and 1969 with

singles such as Peppermint Frappé/Keep on the right side76 and

Pain/Three-two-one-ah,77 the first of which was used as the soundtrack

for the film of the same name directed by Carlos Saura, the real success

would smile on them in the summer of 1968 with the single: Get On

Your Knees/Trying so hard,78 a single that burst onto all the Spanish

radio stations, including the European reference Radio Luxemburg.

76 Sonoplay, 1967, Ref. number: M. 16644-1967.

77 Movieplay, 1969, Ref. number: M. 8469-1969.

78 Sonoplay, 1968, Ref number: 2695-1968.

43

Different elements of African-American soul music in “Get on your Knees”.

Ostinato bass (first staff) and syncopated brass section lines, vocals and syncopated

instrumental interludes. [Transcribed by José Ignacio González Mozos.]

Other singles such as Child/Requiem for a soul, Free Yourself/I wonder

what freedom means and Extra, extra/Reachin' out, or albums such as

Canarios vivos put the icing on the cake of an impeccable career within

the Spanish soul scene of the time. Despite the success of these albums,

in 1972 Los Canarios' music began to evolve in the direction of

progressive and symphonic rock, a process that culminated in 1974 with

the release of the LP: Ciclos, a remarkable conceptual work inspired by

Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.

In the words of Teddy Bautista, Los Canarios influenced not only the

dissemination of popular Spanish urban music with an Afro-American

base, promoting soul music among the Spanish public, but also the

44

training of the majority of musicians who were beginning their musical

activity in those years. In this sense, Teddy Bautista stated:

I think that what Los Canarios meant at that time was a kind of revolutionary

breeze because we were quite provocative and when we were having the most

fun was when the people were most revolutionised. I still meet people who

say to me: «Hey, do you know why I'm in music? Because in 1968 I saw a

concert by Los Canarios». That has a special meaning for me (Arteseros, La

Puerta Verde I, 59 min 12 s).

In 1972, and due to the new style adopted by Los Canarios in the

direction of progressive and symphonic rock, the wind section split

from the group, founding the Orquesta Alcatraz, a light music group

that enjoyed great prestige during the seventies and eighties.

Los Canarios disappeared in 1975 after having set the direction for the

Spanish urban popular music of the late sixties and having given

continuity to Spanish rhythm and blues through a series of soul-pop

recordings that today form an essential part of the history of Spanish

urban popular music of the sixties.

Conclusions

As we have seen throughout this chapter, the syncretism implicit in

blues music evolved in the direction of rhythm and blues and the

African-American based musical styles that shaped it, during the 1940s.

Its influence on popular music in Europe was very important, in fact

Spanish rhythm and blues developed especially throughout the 1960s

as a style inspired by African-American-based musical genres such as

blues, doo-wop, gospel and soul. Although the blues began to arrive

timidly in Spain through the Hot Clubs that proliferated in the country's

main cities in the 1940s and the performances of certain bluesmen such

as Big Bill Broonzy during the 1950s,79 the formal, harmonic and

timbral elements of the blues were integrated into Spanish urban

popular music thanks to the development of pop-rock and the rhythm

and blues that derived from it.

79 Professor Josep Pedro notes: “the concert by bluesman Big Bill Broonzy captivated

a smaller audience of excited enthusiasts, who attended the small Capsa theatre on 11

May 1953” (Pedro, 2021: 55).

45

Spanish bands of the stature of Los Sonor, Los Buenos, Los Dixies,

Henry and The Seven, Los Gatos Negros, Els 5 Xics, Lone Star, Los

Grimm, Los Pop Tops, Los Canarios, Conexion or Los Bravos, among

others, began performing versions of rhythm and blues, doo-wop or

gospel music, with which they managed to consecrate a style of soul

music that marked the path to follow for Spanish popular urban music

in later years.

Therefore, in this chapter we have attempted to trace the origins of blues

music in its journey towards rhythm and blues and the musical styles

that shaped it, making special mention of the sonorous reflection that it

built in the Spanish popular music of the 1960s. We thus confirm the

idea that the path opened up by rhythm and blues music in the Spain of

developmentalism impregnated different genres of popular urban

music, playing an essential role in the adoption of doo-wop, pop-soul

and gospel-pop sounds in the discography of groups such as Los

Bravos, Los Pop Tops, Conexión and Los Canarios. This sonorous path

would continue thanks to the birth of a soul with its own characteristics

that still survives in Spain thanks to bands like The Excitement,

Freedonia, Aurora & The Betrayers or Cosmosoul, a nod to the musical

negritude originally implicit in the blues.

46

Bibliography

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ABC journal, 23-11-1958: 97.

Arteseros, A. (2011), España en mi memoria, Madrid, La Esfera de los

Libros, S. L.

Bowdich, T. E. (1873), Mission from Cape Coast to Ashantee, London,

Griffith & Farran.

Discóbolo magazine Nº 97, 1-04-1966: 57.

Domínguez, S. (2002), Bienvenido Mr. Rock…, Madrid, SGAE

Ediciones y Publicaciones.

Eggerichs, E. (2004), Love and respect: the love she most desires, the

respect he desesperately needs, USA, Thomas Nelson.

Faulín, I. (2015), ¡¡Bienvenido Mr. USA!! Lleida, Editorial Milenio.

González Mozos, J. I. (2018), “Del pop-rock español de los pioneros a

la psicodelia: transgresión y correspondencias entre psicodelia,

música popular urbana, literatura y teatro en la España del

desarrollismo”, ArtyHum, Revista digital de Arte y

Humanidades, 2º Monográfico de Música, pp. 89-116.

Govenar, A. (2004), The early years of Rhythm and Blues, Surrey,

Bushwood Books.

Handy, W. (1941), Father of the Blues, New York: Da Capo Press, Inc.

Iglesias, I. (2017), La modernidad elusiva: jazz, baile y política en la

guerra civil española y el franquismo (1936-1968), Madrid,

CSIC.

Kubik, G. (2017), Jazz transatlantic, University Press of Mississipi.

Laing, A. (1825), Travels in the Timanee, Kooranko, and Soolima

Countries, in Western Africa, London, John Murray,

Albermale-street.

Lapuente, L. (2015), El muelle de la bahía: una historia del soul,

Valencia, Grupo Midons 2000.

López Poy, M. (2018), Todo Blues, Barcelona, Redbook Ediciones.

Malone, B. C. & Stricklin, D. (2003), Southern music/American music,

Kentucky, The University Press of Kentucky.

Martin, L. A. (2014), Preaching on Wax: the Phonograph and the

Shaping of Modern African American Religion, New York, New

York University Press.

Northup, S. (2014), Doce años de esclavitud, Barcelona, Ediciones

Barataria.

Pedro, J. (2021), El blues en España, Valencia, Tirant Humanidades.

Ward, B. (1998), Just my soul responding: rhythm and blues, black

47

consciousness, and race relations, London, University of

California Press.

Weisman, D. (2005), Blues: The Basics, New York, Routledge.

INTERVIEWS:

-Interview with Pedro Ample (December 4, 2017).

-Interview with Luis Cobos (October 23, 2017).

PRIVATE FILES AND DOCUMENTARIES:

-Audiovisual archive of the documentary maker Alfonso Arteseros.

-Alfonso Arteseros: La Puerta Verde I.

-Alfonso Arteseros: Phil Trim y la música valenciana.

WEBS:

-https://sandiegotroubadour.com/2015/10/race-records-the-birth-of-black-

blues-and-jazz/

-http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/cine-de-barrio/cine-barrio-chicos-

chicas/3631318/

- Barger, TK. (2015). Author looks at history of folk sermons, pastor who

delivered

them.

The

Blade.

3-1-2015.

http://www.toledoblade.com/Religion/2015/01/03/Author-looks-at-history-

of-folk-sermons-pastors-who-delivered-them.html

48

Indian Blues: The origins of a Native-African American culture in

colonial Florida

Héctor Martínez

Abstract: In classical blues there are a large number of artists of African and Native

American descent. From T-Bone Walker to Charlie Patton, the mixture of blood and

cultures influenced their musical repertoire, which was infused with references to

these native heritages. This study aims to shed light on this phenomenon of

miscegenation that began in the Modern Age in the colonies of Louisiana and Florida,

favored by the less repressive environment of these territories in French and Spanish

hands. The escaped slaves or maroon established a relationship with the natives of the

environment and forged a relationship of warlike alliance, friendship or vassalage,

depending on the circumstances. The climax came with the Seminole Wars and with

the invasion and subsequent purchase of the Florida territory by the United States of

America and its consequent expulsion of the Indians and their allies.

Keywords: Black Seminole, slavery, Maroon, Indian Blues, Spanish Florida,

Diaspora

Introduction: Blues in the Territory

On June 14, 1929, Charlie Patton stepped into a studio in Richmond,

Indiana for the first time, to record some of the songs from his repertory.

Among these was what would be one of his first hits, Down the Dirt

Road Blues, a song about life on the road that included the following

lines:

I feel like choppin', chips flyin' everywhere

I feel like choppin', chips flyin' everywhere

I been to the Nation, Lord, but I couldn't stay there

Patton talks about going to the Nation, referring to the territory that was

conceded to American Indians belonging to the Five Civilized Tribes80

after they were expelled from their ancestral lands in 1834, due to the

Indian Intercourse Act. This territory was to the west of the Mississippi

River, on uninhabited land, and the journey that Indigenous people had

to take over thousands of miles, known as the Trail of Tears, took

thousands of their lives.

80 The Five Civilized Tribes were those American Indian tribes that had showed some

degree of acceptance of certain aspects of Western culture, such as the language. The

five tribes were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole peoples.

49

This song could have passed unnoticed among the others that Patton

recorded if tradition, fueled by the comments of Patton’s protégés, Son

House and Honeyboy Edwards, had not accorded the musician

American Indian ancestors.

Patton’s song was not groundbreaking, since there were earlier songs

that talked about this Nation, such as Shanty Blues, recorded in 1927 by

Henry Thomas, or Mooch Richardson’s Low Down Barrel House

Blues, which dates to 1928. There is no evidence that either Thomas or

Richardson had American Indian ancestry, unlike the musicians behind

the song Bamalong Blues, from 1927, recorded by Jim Baxter and his

father Andrew, who was half Cherokee.81

As well as the Nation, a new concept was introduced in other songs of

that time – the Territory – the name given to the space where the

reserves for American Indian tribes were established, in the present-day

state of Oklahoma. It was not unusual for songwriters to mention the

Nation and refer to the Territory in the same song, as George ‘Bullet’

Williams did in his Touch Me Light, Mama:

I went to the Nation, from there to the territo'

I couldn't find my good gal, honey, nowhere I go

Williams talks of going to the Nation and from there to the territo’,

making an interesting distinction between the two terms and reflecting

historical events in the song’s message, as the terrains that had been

allocated to the Five Civilized Tribes were reorganized by the federal

government in 1889: an action driven by the settlers’ desire for virgin

land.82

The region was divided into two territories: the Territory of Oklahoma

in the west, which was shared between the white settlers using the ‘land

run’ method;83 and the Indian Territory to the east, now half its former

81Haymes, M. (1990), The Red Man and the Blues, earlyblues.com.

https://www.earlyblues.com/Essay%20%20The%20Red%20Man%20and%20The%

20Blues%20-%20Chapter%204.htm

82Smith, C. (2007), “Going to the Nation: The Idea of Oklahoma in Early Blues

Recordings”, Popular Music, Vol 26, No. 1, Special Issue on the Blues in Honour of

Paul Oliver, pp. 83-96: 85.

83A ‘land run’ was a method for sharing out plots of unassigned land in which

ownership of a terrain was granted to the first settler who arrived on it. Participants

gathered at a specified spot and waited for the starter pistol to be fired, at which point

50

size. This Indian Territory was the ‘territor’ about which ‘Bullet’

Williams would sing.

In addition to Charlie Patton and the Baxters, other blues musicians,

such as the Chatmon family, Scrapper Blackwell, ‘Champion’ Jack

Dupree, Robert Wilkins, Lowell Fulson, Roy Brown, Leadbelly and

Louisiana Red,84 also described themselves as descendants of American

Indians although, as we have seen, songs about the Indian Nation and

its territory were also performed by musicians with not a drop of Indian

blood in their veins.

The motivation behind this interest among African American musicians

may have other origins, as well as kinship, as we will see below.

The Indian Territory was divided into five areas, one for each Civilized

Tribe; each of these areas was governed by the laws of the tribe, and the

tenets of the white man’s way of life did not apply:

As a result the physical appearance of Indian Territory towns

presented a shocking contrast to their real prosperity. There were no

city taxes except in the Cherokee Nation, hence no schools except

voluntary subscription schools, no police or fire protection, and no

sewers, city lighting, or paving.85

It was not until 1907, when Oklahoma became a state within the Union

and the Indian Territory disappeared, that laws deemed civilized by

Western culture began to be applied.

The years of laxity in enforcing the law involved, primarily, a lack of

restrictions on the consumption of alcohol, gambling and prostitution,

as a result of which Oklahoma was soon filled with hustlers, hobos,

tricksters, card sharps, madams, street musicians and other colorful

characters.

they raced off with the intention of claiming a piece of land. Several of these races

were organized in the Oklahoma Territory between 1889 and 1895 to apportion out

the land that had previously been granted to the American Indian tribes.

84 Haymes. M. (1990).

85 Debo, A. (1973), And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized

Tribes, Princeton University Press, p. 18.

51

Many of the musicians were Black, given that the Jim Crow laws86 were

among those that were not enforced in the Indian territory, with the

result that Oklahoma was viewed in the deep South as a destination

where one could enjoy a certain amount of freedom.

Apart from coming to Oklahoma for work or good times, an outsider

could take the opportunity to seek an Indian wife there, and so secure

one of the plots of land allocated to the Indigenous population.

American Indian societies were matrilineal, meaning that tribal

membership and inheritance were passed down by the women. A man

from outside the Nation could therefore marry into the tribe and have a

relatively stable future.

He might even make it big, thanks to the oil that lay under many plots

of land: a fact which attracted all kinds of vultures and schemers who

would try to con the legitimate owners or declare themselves

descendants of some long-departed Indian woman, so as to lay claim to

the property in a lucrative inheritance.

This also found expression in some blues songs, such as Big Chief

Blues, by Furry Lewis, where the singer claims that when he marries, it

will be to an Indian woman, so that he can become the son-in-law of the

tribal chief:

Baby, when I marry, goin' to marry an Indian squaw

I mean when I marry, goin' to marry an Indian squaw

Big chief's, Lord, be my daddy-in-law

Some years later, Cripple Clarence Lofton sang about the same idea in

his Streamline Train, as did Will Shade in Memphis Boy Blues, by the

Memphis Jug Band, which suggests that this endeavor to marry an

American Indian woman was common in popular African American

culture.

These relationships between Indigenous and African American people

led to an intimate interplay between the two cultures, generating flows

of cultural influence that would be given shape in blues music.

Some authors, such as Joe Gioia, argue that the contribution of

American Indians to blues music was greater even than the influence of

86 Jim Crow laws were all the laws of a clearly segregationist nature that were adopted

in the US.

52

African Americans, contending that the blues has more in common with

Indigenous music than it does with the music of the African griots, who

are always cited as the most direct influence of the bluesman.

Gioia cites the use of the exclamation “hey hey”, an omnipresent

expression in blues songs that was used by the Plains Indians to call

upon the spirits, as one of the clearest Indigenous contributions to

African American music.87

Two of the most salient songs in this respect were Blind Blake’s Hey

Daddy Blues, recorded in Chicago in 1927, and Hey Hey, recorded in

1952 by Big Bill Broonzy, in which the word is used to call for the

attention of the person the song addresses:

Hey hey your daddy's feeling blue

Hey hey your daddy's feeling blue

I'm worried all the time, can't keep you off my mind

Hey hey your daddy's feeling blue

Gioia also cites Indian Tom-Tom as an example of the roots shared by

the blues and certain forms of American Indian music. The song

consists of a series of American Indian chants recorded in 1928 by Big

Chief Henry’s Indian String Band, a Creek group from Oklahoma

whose traditional Indigenous music had a clearly African American

violin and guitar accompaniment.88

Some contemporary artists such as Cyril Neville – singer in The Meters

and The Neville Brothers – make the case for the existence of this

influence by citing evidence not from the Indian Territory era, but from

the years prior to the Trail of Tears:

We have Native blood, but we’re not sure what nation.... It goes back

hundreds of years. The shuffle and hesitation in the second line

rhythm is probably a combination of the two musical cultures.

Africans and Natives had similar ways of worshipping and playing

music, and they were thrown together by racism and slavery...89

87 Gioia, J. (2013), The Guitar and the New World: A Fugitive History, Excelsior

Editions, p. 96.

88 Ibid. p. 90.

89 Cain, M. C. (2006), “Red, Black and Blues: Race, Nation and Recognition for the

Bluez”, MUSICultures, 33, p. 8.

53

The musician Taj Mahal also upholds this idea of a long road traveled

side-by-side by American Indians and African Americans over

hundreds of years, leaving their mark on the blues, gospel and jazz. He

identifies elements of both cultures in the way Little Brother

Montgomery sang:

The majority of African-American people have some Native

blood.....That fast vibrato you hear in the vocals of Little Brother

Montgomery, in songs like the “Vicksburg Blues,” it's both African

and Native. That vibrato and tone, you have to work at it from the

back of your throat and nose to crank it out and go up into that falsetto

that happens. He might look Creole, but when you hear him sing, it's

Native American singing.... There were a hundred years when the

races blended hard-core. They were Black Indians in jazz, blues,

gospel everything. It's an untapped history and when people start

investigating it, they're going to be surprised.90

The objective of this text is to investigate what Taj Mahal calls Black

Indians: the result of bloodlines mixed over the centuries. There were

significant encounters in the Mississippi valley between Louisiana

slaves and the Natchez tribe, and with the Cherokee people in the

settlements of the Carolinas and Alabama. However, here we will focus

on one of the Five Civilized Tribes, the Seminoles, who had a very

special relationship with the African American community during the

colonial era, which would lead to the emergence of a new tribe: the

Black Seminoles.

In memory of the Seminole People, who originated in Florida, their

name was given to the train line that ran through the state, to which the

musician raised in the Sunshine State, Tampa Red, would dedicate a

song:

I’ve got the Seminole blues

Leaving on my mind

Leaving on my mind, whoa-ooh

Seminole blues, leaving on my mind

I’m goin’ to find my baby

If I have to ride the blind.

90 Ibíd. p. 9.

54

Indians and Africans in Spanish Florida: A safe haven?

The history of La Florida,91 from Ponce de León’s landing in 1513 to

the mid-nineteenth century, was marked by the struggle of the Spanish

with, first, the English and later, the Americans. The Indigenous and

African American populations suffered most from these conflicts,

sometimes as the victims of collateral damage, and at other times from

the colonial powers using them as a military tool with which to damage

their enemies.

The first European colony in what is now the United States was founded

by Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526 in the present-day state of Georgia

and received the name of San Miguel de Gualdape. A significant

amount of slave labor arrived in this colony from Africa, since the

Spanish soon realized that it would be very challenging to replicate on

the North American Atlantic coast the encomienda model implemented

in the Caribbean region.92 This difficulty was due to the low density of

the Native population in that region and the hostility with which any

attempt by the Spanish military or Franciscan friars to approach them

was received.

Only four months after San Miguel de Gualdape was founded, the poor

living conditions in the colony caused by the shortage of food and

proliferation of diseases led the Guale people,93 who were used by the

Spanish to provide the food supplies needed by the colony, rebelled.

The revolt was led by a mico – or Guale chief – named Juanillo, who

had a deep hatred of the Franciscan friars and had ordered several of

them to be assassinated. The African slaves in the colony supported the

rebellion, which resulted in its success and the colony being dismantled

and abandoned. Many of the slaves and Guale people who participated

in the rebellion fled to the forests of La Florida, in what may have been

91 The name “La Florida” is used to refer to the historical territory of “Spanish Florida”

that existed in the periods of 1513-1763 and 1783-1821.

92 In the encomienda system, the Spanish crown assigned a certain number of Native

people to an encomendero, as compensation for his service. Thereafter, the

encomendero took responsibility for the Native people entrusted to him, protecting

and evangelizing them, and securing the profits generated by their work.

93The Guale tribe inhabited the north of La Florida and south Georgia. Their resistance

to Spanish attempts at Christianization resulted in them being annihilated by the

Spanish troops. The dispersal of the survivors and their mixing with other tribes in the

area led to the ethnogenesis of the Yamasees.

55

the first contact between African Americans and American Indians in

the region.94

This first colonial debacle discouraged the Spanish, who did not make

any great advances in their occupation of territory, although they did

react to the arrival of an expedition of French Huguenots to North

America. This Protestant group would found a fort called Charlesfort in

1563, in what is now South Carolina, which would be attacked by the

Spanish in 1566. After expulsion of the French, the Spanish would

reinforce the fort and establish a mission named Santa Elena there, to

shore up their defenses in the face of a possible English advance from

the north.95

This would be the dynamic throughout the 16th and 17th centuries,

marked by the founding of two cities that would be the focal points of

Spanish and English operations: San Agustín (now St. Augustine), in

1565, and Jamestown, in 1609.

The establishment of Jamestown marked the beginning of the English

presence, serving as a bridgehead for founding Charleston in 1670,

which would draw the frontier between English and Spanish territory

back to the approximate position of the current border between the

states of Florida and Georgia. San Agustín, the capital of the Spanish

colony, would effectively become a frontier city. This made it the object

of English attacks and incursions, which would be of central importance

for the future of Native and African American people.

In retaliation for the privateer attacks on San Agustín sent from the

Carolinas, the Spanish launched several raids on the plantations of the

Carolinas between 1686 and 1687. In these incursions, the Spanish stole

food supplies, captured slaves and destroyed the plantations, including

the English governor’s mansion. This was not only an application of lex

talionis – an eye for an eye – but served to undermine the burgeoning

94Dixon, A. E. (2020), “Black Seminole Ethnogenisis: Origins, Cultural

Characteristics and Alliances”, Phylon (1960-), Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 8-24, p. 9.

95 Toscano, N. (2008), “La Florida y el suroeste americano”, Enciclopedia del español

en los Estados Unidos, pp. 32-55, p. 42.

56

plantation economy, based on slave labor, that had been developed in

the Carolinas since Charleston was founded.96

The Spanish soon found a new way to chasten the English colonizers.

In 1688, a group of slaves who had fled the Carolinas – eight men, two

women and a child – arrived at San Agustín in a boat. The governor of

La Florida offered them their liberty in exchange for embracing the

Catholic religion and engaging in paid work to improve the Castillo de

San Marcos, close to San Agustín. The English governor sent

emissaries to the capital of La Florida calling for the slaves to be

returned to their owners, but received a negative response: the Spanish

contended that, having converted to Catholicism, they were free

individuals and could not be enslaved again.

In the following years, more Maroons97 arrived from the English

colonies, which prompted King Charles II of Spain to sign a royal

decree on November 7, 1693 offering freedom to the slaves who had

escaped the English colonies if they converted to the Catholic faith, the

idea being to motivate more slaves to flee the plantations in Virginia

and the Carolinas. This would leave the economy of these colonies,

which was based almost exclusively on slave labor, in a precarious

position.98

[…] desde el año de 1693 por diferentes Reales Cedulas se a mandado

por S.M. dar Libertad a los Negros que fujitivos de las Colonias

Ynglesas an venido anpararse y Recevir el Bautismo a los Dominios

de S.M. en la florida de lo que a resultado abersele dado Libertad a

unos por haverlo participado a S.M. […]99

The Spanish scheme worked: while slavery had not been abolished in

La Florida, offering freedom to the fugitive slaves had a pull effect that

96 Wasserman, A. (2010), A People’s History of Florida, 1513-1876: How Africans,

Seminoles, Women, and Lower Class Whites Shaped the Sunshine State, Adam

Wasserman, pp. 86-87.

97 “Maroon” is used in this text in the sense of the Spanish term, cimarrón, as a person

who escaped slavery and settled outside of slave society, sometimes in remote areas

but also in existing white and Indigenous settlements.

98 Cano Borrego, P. D. (2019), “La libertad de los esclavos fugitivos y la milicia negra

en la Florida española en el siglo XVII”, Revista de la Inquisición. Intolerancia y

Derechos Humanos, Vol. 23, pp. 223-234, p. 225.

99 Wright, I. A. (1924), “Dispatches of Spanish Officials Bearing on the Free Negro

Settlement of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, Florida”, The Journal of Negro

History, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 144-195, p. 180.

57

soon proved a headache for the English authorities, who received a

deluge of complaints from the colonists as they watched their enslaved

workforce disintegrate.

The English responded with force using, as noted earlier, American

Indians as instruments to execute their plans. Bearing in mind the

modest amount of territory occupied by the Spanish –the capital, San

Agustín, the city of Panzacola in the Gulf of Mexico, and a few forts

and missions dotted around the territory – the colony was sustained

primarily by the diplomacy employed with the Indigenous tribes who,

after their first, traumatic contact with the Spanish, had agreed to

provide them with food supplies in exchange for protection.

Aware of these circumstances, the English decided to strike an indirect

blow to the Spanish by attacking their Native allies. To do so, the

English would use their own Lower Creek and Yamasee allies, inciting

them to make incursions into La Florida territory. These raids became

increasingly bloody: settlements were destroyed and Indigenous people

were captured to sell to the English as slaves.

These attacks gradually forced the Apalachee people – the last Pre-

Columbian Native inhabitants in La Florida – to seek refuge in the area

surrounding San Agustín, where they hoped to be protected by the

Spanish, and in the French city of Mobile. This protection could not

prevent the virtual decimation of the Apalachee population in 1704,

when a party of English and Creek raiders swept through the north of

La Florida, slaughtering members of this tribe.100

As a result of this campaign, the last Apalachee people migrated to the

south, where they took refuge in Cayo Hueso (today’s Key West), and

were then taken by the Spanish authorities to the nearest territory, Cuba.

Little is known of what happened to this group of Florida Natives on

the Caribbean island, although it is suspected that the vast majority of

them died from typhus and smallpox.

Seven years later, in 1711, another group of Indigenous people from La

Florida arrived in Cuba and were settled in the Havana suburb of

100 Wasserman, A. (2010), p. 54.

58

Guanabacoa, under the tutelage of the parish priest, who was tasked

with teaching them the Spanish language and Christian doctrine.101

When the Native population of the peninsula had decreased so much

that expeditions to capture slaves began to be relatively unprofitable,

the British decided to enslave their own Lower Creek and Yamasee

allies, which prompted the two tribes to change sides and join forces

with the Spanish. Yamasee and Lower Creek People populated the areas

in the south of Georgia and the north of Florida that had been the

ancestral home of the Apalachee tribe. The new settlements soon

became a safe haven for Maroons who did not want to live alongside

white people, while also serving as a first line of defense against the

British for San Agustín.102

These Yamasee and Lower Creek settlements would be the seedbed for

the ethnogenesis of the Seminole tribe, whose name was a corruption

of the Spanish word cimarrón and meant ‘deserter’ in the Muscogee

language.

The Lower Creek and Yamasee tribes were age-old enemies, meaning

that they had several confrontations which concluded when the Creeks

ambushed the Yamasees at the San Juan River, exterminating all of

their warriors except forty to forty-five men. According to Seminole

tradition, the Creek people took the Yamasee women, and when a baby

with particularly dark skin was born, its Yamasee blood was said to be

showing.103

The Spanish fought back by incentivizing a larger-scale flight of slaves

from the British colonies. To do so, they sent secret agents to visit the

Carolina plantations, informing the slaves that they would receive their

liberty and even be given paid employment if they fled to Spanish

territory.

101 Worth, J. E. (2004), A History of Southeastern Indians in Cuba, 1513-1823,

Unpublished paper presented at Southeastern Archaeological Conference, St. Louis,

Missouri, pp. 6-7.

102 Wasserman, A. (2010), p. 90.

103 Covington, J. W. (1967), “Migration into Florida of the Seminoles, 1700-1820”,

Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 340-357, p. 350.

59

Unsurprisingly, this fueled the desire to escape for a great number of

slaves, who would resort to the use of arms, if necessary, to get

themselves across the border.

The groups of Maroons who had journeyed from the British north

interacted with the Yamasees and Creeks – the Seminole people – but

without forming a homogenous community with them. The Maroons

settled in Florida in one of two ways: either in small, scattered

communities on the outskirts of Panzacola (present-day Pensacola) and

San Agustín, such as Pilaklikaha, King Hadjo’s Town, Bucker

Woman’s Town, Mulatto Girls’ Town and Minatti, or in the newly-

founded fort of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé, later renamed

Fort Mose.104

Fort Mose was built in 1738 to accommodate the large number of

runaway slaves that were arriving in San Agustín and, as an added

benefit, to protect the city from potential British attacks. Fugitive slaves

newly arriving in San Agustín were sent to the fort and, although several

friars were posted there, its leader was chosen by its inhabitants: the

first was Francisco Menéndez, the Maroon of Mandinga origin and

member of the militia of negros y pardos in La Florida. The population

of the fort was never particularly large, at around one hundred people,

but it became the first settlement of free Black citizens in the territory

of the present-day United States.105

The appeal created by the idea of freedom in Fort Mose among slaves

on the British plantations was the spark that ignited the bloodiest revolt

in the history of North America, the Stono Rebellion, which began on

Sunday, September 9, 1739.

The leader of the rebellion, an Angolan slave called Jemmy from a

plantation near the Stono River, took twenty men to Hutchinson’s store,

where they stole arms and ammunition and decapitated the two white

men who were occupying the building. From there, Jemmy and his men

headed south of the Stono River, killing more than twenty white people

in the area as they acquired more weapons, gunpowder, provisions and,

most importantly, men. By the end of the day, they were close to the

104 Dixon, A. E. (2020), p. 12.

105 Cano Borrego, P. D. (2019), p. 228.

60

Jacksonborough ferry on the Edisto River, and they had amassed more

than a hundred slaves.

Although the rebel group had traveled ten miles from Stono River to

the bridge over the Edisto River, they were a long way from Florida.

The sense of approaching war present in the colony, along with the

colonists’ prevailing fear of outright revolt among the slaves, resulted

in Governor William Bull being sent to confront the group, leading a

militia of one hundred soldiers. After the first skirmish, thirty slaves

were killed and over the following month, most of those who escaped

were captured and executed.106

There was also a religious component to the Stono case, since many

slaves from this area “are a People brought from the Kingdom of

Angola… many thousands of the Negroes there profess the Roman

Catholic Religion”107 which, in the eyes of the British, further

motivated these slaves to flee toward the Catholic kingdom of Spain to

the cry of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”108

The belligerent actions between the British and Spanish on the border

reached a head when Fort Mose became one of the arenas of the War of

Jenkins’ Ear (known as the Guerra de Asiento in Spanish)109 on

American land. Taking advantage of the general clamor for war, the

governor of the recently founded colony of Georgia, James Oglethorpe,

sent an army made up of British militia and Creek allies to attack San

Agustín. When passing by Fort Mose, which was a strategically

important site for defense and laying siege to the capital of La Florida,

the governor decided to take control of it. Achieving this posed no great

106 Niven, S. J. (2016), The Stono Slave Rebellion Was Nearly Erased From US

History Books, The Root, https://www.theroot.com/the-stono-slave-rebellion-was-

nearly-erased-from-us-his-1790854336.

107 Thorton, J. K. (1988), “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and

the Americas”, The Americas, Vol. 44, No. 3, pp. 261-278, pp. 268-269.

108 Wasserman, A. (2010), p. 89.

109 This war was waged between Britain and Spain from 1739 until 1748 and received

its Spanish name due to the situation that sparked the hostilities: the suppression of

the British right to asiento, which was a monopoly contract for trading slaves in the

Spanish colonies. This right was denied in retaliation for the contraband from which

the British and Dutch were profiting, taking advantage of the Spanish colonies’

difficulties with securing provisions. The conflict’s English name came from the

casus belli of the war: an incident between the smuggler, Robert Jenkins, and a

Spanish coastguard, which resulted in the amputation of the Briton’s ear.

61

difficulty, since it had just been evacuated, after Indigenous scouts

allied to the Spanish brought news of the enemy troop movements.

The Spanish response was resounding, as they launched an attack with

a battalion comprising Black and mixed-race men that annihilated the

troops of Colonel Palmer, who had been posted in the fort after its

capture. This attack resulted in the destruction of Fort Mose, weakening

the morale of the British who, seeing that the Spanish were also

receiving reinforcements over the sea from Cuba, decided to lift their

siege of San Agustín and return to Georgia.

After the destruction of Fort Mose, most of the Maroons who had lived

there went to settle in San Agustín, which provided the conditions for

them to fully embrace Catholicism and the Spanish language, as well as

certain Hispanic customs. This communal life in San Agustín led to the

rise of mixed marriages, since there were many fewer women of

African origin who had escaped the British colonies than men. It was

therefore common for the men to look for partners among the Native or

white women who lived in the city.

However, tensions soon arose between the Maroons that had come from

Fort Mose and San Agustín’s poorest white people, the latter seeing the

former as direct competitors when it came to securing work and

sustenance. As a result, in 1749, Governor Fulgencio García de Solís

ordered the fort to be rebuilt and, in 1752, he commanded the Black

people to return to Fort Mose. These Black residents refused stating

that, while life in the fort had been better than life in the plantations, it

was not comparable to the freedom they enjoyed in San Agustín.110

The strain on resources felt across the province of La Florida at the time

was evident in Fort Mose, where the armed militia was totally lacking

in ammunition with which to defend itself. As a result, in 1759, the

Black people living there were allowed to return to San Agustín if they

so desired.111

The importance of Fort Mose lies not only in its status as the first legally

established African American settlement, but also in the fact that it

acted as a magnet for Indigenous Seminole people who settled nearby

110 Dixon, A. E. (2020), p. 13.

111 Morgan, A. A. (2020), Precarious lives. Black Seminoles and other freedom

seekers in Florida before the US civil war, A. A. Morgan, p. 21.

62

after fleeing from the British. Contact between these two ethnic groups

would thereby become even more frequent in the subsequent chapters

of Florida’s history.

Fort Mose was permanently abandoned in 1763, the year in which the

Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Seven Years’ War, in which half

of Europe had fought each other. Spain and Britain were left on opposite

sides, and had to agree on the exchange of several territories as a result

of the British superiority during the conflict: in order for Spain to keep

Havana and Manila, which had been conquered by the British, it had to

give La Florida to them, receiving Louisiana from France in exchange.

These exchanges forced the sparse Spanish population of what was now

British Florida to leave the province, with dramatic consequences for

Black and Indigenous people. The former witnessed the loss of the right

to freedom granted by the Spanish crown to slaves who had escaped

British territory. The Seminole people, meanwhile, lost their Spanish

allies, leaving them in the hands of the British and, above all, their

Creek enemies.

Faced with this situation, many Indigenous and Black people decided

to hide out in remote parts of the peninsula, seeking protection from

nature, although no small number of them decided to emigrate

alongside the Spanish from San Agustín to Havana. There they could

choose between going to Guanabacoa, where Indigenous people from

Florida had already been living since 1704 and 1711, as noted earlier,

or settling in La Regla. Another eighty-four families were settled,

together with families from the Canary Islands, in a newly created town

called San Agustín de la Nueva Florida.112

The destination of the inhabitants of Panzacola and San Marcos de

Apalache, as well as the nearby presidios (fortified bases or settlements)

of Escambe and Punta Rasa,113 which together came to over six hundred

military personnel and civilians, was La Antigua Veracruz (the present-

day city of La Antigua) in Mexico. They spent almost a year living in

the city’s port, before being relocated to a town founded for this

112 Cano Borrego, P. D. (2019), pp. 232-233.

113 The northern border of Nueva España was protected by a network of presidios

that extended from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. Each presidio consisted of a

fortification with a garrison of around forty to fifty soldiers, Indigenous explorers,

and a stable of seven horses and one mule per soldier.

63

purpose, San Carlos, around two and a half leagues from La Antigua

Veracruz.114

The governor of La Florida, Melchor Feliú, and the last families

remaining in San Agustín, left the city for Havana on June 21, 1764.

An uncertain future: Florida changes hands

The British tried to set up a plantation economy in Florida similar to

that established in the Carolinas and Georgia, so they drew on colonists

with experience in these territories to implement their existing work

methods. This created two fundamental changes in the lives of African

Americans. Firstly, greater separation between the Black and white

social groups was enforced, with mixing of the two avoided. The

privileges of the social group comprising free people of color that had

formed in La Florida during two centuries of Spanish occupation were

eliminated. Secondly, given the size of the workforce required by the

British plantation economy, the number of people with African origins

increased substantially as large shipments of slaves arrived, in even

more degrading conditions than in the previous period.115

The speed at which demand for labor was increasing outstripped that at

which African slaves were arriving, which drove an increase in raids

into the Florida forests to locate the settlements where Maroons were

hiding, in order to capture and enslave them again. This pushed the

Maroons to seek refuge further and further south, as had occurred with

the waves of attacks in 1704, until they reached Cayo Vacas (now

known as Vaca Key) and Cayo Hueso.116

114 García de León, A. (1996), “Indios de la Florida en La Antigua, Veracruz, 1757-

1770. Un episodio de la decadencia de España ante Inglaterra”, Estudios de historia

novohispana, No. 16, pp. 101-118, p. 110.

115 Riordan, P. (1996), “Finding Freedom in Florida: Native Peoples, African

Americans, and Colonist, 1670-1818”, The Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 75, No.

1, pp- 24-43, p. 34. An example of the change in how slaves were treated can be found

in a description written in 1783 of the punishment meted out to Black people who met

to dance after 10 o’clock at night: thirty-nine lashes, in Leitch Wright Jr. J. (1976),

“Blacks in British East Florida”, The Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 4.

The Floridas in the Revolutionary Era: Bicentennial Issue, pp. 425-442, p. 432.

116 Covington, J. W. (1967), p. 342.

64

This need for labor prompted certain colonists to come up with a very

different solution to that employed thus far, albeit with similar results.

In 1768, Andrew Turnbull, owner of the New Smyrna plantation, drew

in Mediterranean workers from Greece, Corsica and Menorca with the

false promise of working on a fertile land where they would be

guaranteed to receive all basic provisions, such as food, clothes and

tools. The agreement established that, after a three-year period of

service, they would be assigned ownership of a plot of land and thereby

gain their freedom.

Turnbull treated these settlers as the other plantation owners treated the

African slaves. After all, Turnbull had sought out these Mediterranean

workers in the belief that he could secure greater yields from them than

he could from Africans, since they would be more docile and cause

fewer problems. The working conditions were brutal and, in just two

years, half of the 1,400 settlers had died. In 1777, the relentless

hardships led the remaining survivors to move to San Agustín, where

they would become ancestors of the region’s current population of

Mediterranean descent, and put an end to Doctor Turnbull’s utopian

project.117

Between 1775 and 1783, the American War of Independence was

fought between the Thirteen Colonies of North America, supported by

Spain and France, and the British metropolis. During the war, the

British employed the tactic used earlier by Spain, offering freedom to

slaves fleeing from Georgia to Florida. Attacks were also launched from

Seminole settlements to capture or liberate, depending on your

perspective, slaves from the plantations belonging to the American

Patriots.118

These attacks resulted in people of African descent being incorporated

en masse into the Seminole settlements, in the capacity of serfs. While

the Seminole people, like the rest of the Five Civilized Tribes, accepted

the institution of slavery brought into their continent by the white man,

they did not understand it in the same way, their version being closer to

a vassalage in which the Maroons paid a tax in exchange for protection.

117 Fernández-Shaw, C. M. (1972), Presencia Española en los Estados Unidos,

Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, p. 215.

118 Wasserman, A. (2010), p. 116.

65

The Maroons lived freely, but in nearby communities rather than

sharing the Seminole people’s settlements. The white observers who

visited some of these Black settlements described how there was good

housing, and that the residents cultivated their lands and kept their own

livestock. They had to give part of the profits obtained from their

harvests or slaughter of animals to the Seminoles as a tax. They were

also able to hunt and fish freely, and they took part in the Seminole

people’s armed conflicts as warriors.119

The Maroons did not belong to the tribe, as this right was only granted

to those with a Seminole mother but, on occasions, a Maroon would

enter into marriage with a Native person, if the elders of the Seminole

tribe and the African community acquiesced to it. These Maroons who

lived alongside the Seminole people are those described as Black

Seminoles.

The Black Seminoles’ contributions to the Seminole people included

the agricultural knowledge they brought from Africa and their work on

the plantations, which made harvests more productive and ensured the

tribe’s survival. In exchange, the Seminoles protected and defended the

Black people from white slave hunters. The Black Seminoles were also

important to the Native people because of their knowledge of white

men, gained in their time living with them as slaves. They knew about

white traditions and customs, which was important when it came to

trade and managing the relationship between the Indigenous people and

the white colonists, but above all, they were familiar with the languages

of the colonists: both English and Spanish. This gave them a key role

as interpreters between the Native people and the whites, particularly in

negotiations relating to conflicts.

In addition to the European languages, the Black Seminole people had

developed their own language: Afro-Seminole Creole. This language is

actually a dialect of the Gullah language spoken by slaves in plantations

on the Sea Islands of Georgia and the Carolinas: the place from which

the Maroons who would form the Black Seminole group had come.

Gullah or Geechee, also known as Sea Island Creole English, is a pidgin

language – an informal mixture of several languages – which arose in

the aforementioned Atlantic coastal region. It has its roots in various

119 Porter, K. (1964), “Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835-1842”, The Journal of

Southern History, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 427-450, p. 428.

66

West African languages, such as Wolof and Ewe, to which words from

the informal English spoken on the American plantations were added.

The words of J. Leitch Wright Jr. paint a picture of how Florida was a

veritable Tower of Babel at the time:

A visitor to East Florida’s slave quarters during the American

Revolution might have hear English, French, Mandingo, Fulani,

Hausa, and Mende, among other languages. In the Indian country

there were black Hitchiti and Muskogee speakers. A pidgin, such as

Gullah, was emerging and presumable was spoken with varying

degrees of proficiency by a majority of East Florida Blacks.120

When the province fell into Spanish hands again in 1784 (and became

known as La Florida once more), as a result of the end of the American

War of Independence, the Spanish authorities decided to incentivize

those Black and Indigenous people who had been deported from British

Florida to return. Those who came back did not go to the cities, but

settled in the communities of the Indigenous Seminole people with

whom they had been living before their deportation.121

The situation in La Florida after the British interregnum had changed

significantly: its neighbor to the north was now the United States of

America, which was experiencing an economic boom, created by its

expansion into new territories and the plantation economy.

Consequently, despite Spain having been an important ally in their

struggle for independence, the North Americans set their sights on La

Florida, taking advantage of the weakness shown by the Spanish in the

preceding years.

First, they proposed that Spain revoke the law under which runaway

slaves on foreign soil were granted freedom when they sought asylum

on Spanish territory. The man charged with spearheading this request

was Thomas Jefferson, and the pressure he placed on the Spanish

diplomats bore fruit: on May 7, 1790, a Royal Order was published

calling for all fugitive slaves originating in the United States to be

arrested and returned to their owners, after the latter had proved

ownership and paid the costs associated with the capture and upkeep of

the slaves until their handover.

120 Leitch Wright Jr. J. (1976), p. 427.

121 Dixon, A. E. (2020), pp. 14-17.

67

The end of emancipation for slaves arriving from the north and the

threat of raids by fugitive slave catchers prompted the Maroons to

engage in a series of actions to protect themselves from that point

onward, the most significant being that led by the adventurer, William

Augustus Bowles.

Bowles was born in the state of Maryland around 1763 and, when he

was still a boy of thirteen years, he enlisted as a volunteer in the loyalist

army in the American War of Independence, and was sent to join the

garrison of Panzacola. After a year there, he deserted and joined a party

of Muskogee people, going to live in one of their encampments. He

spent two years with them, in which he learned their language and

traditions, and went so far as to marry two Muskogee women, which

made him a person of respect among the tribe.

When Bowles returned to the British army and his old post in the

Panzacola garrison in 1781, there was a battle with the Spanish in which

he was captured and sent to a military camp in Havana, from which he

escaped. He spent a year in New York before traveling to the Bahamas,

where he developed a relationship with the future governor, Lord

Dunmore. In 1788, he returned to La Florida with the intention of

setting up a trading post for commerce between his Bahamian partners

and the Indigenous population, for which purpose he had assembled a

militia of Seminole people and Britons who were eager to make their

fortune and acquire land. This adventure came to nothing because of his

failure to secure the support he needed, so he decided to organize a tour

around British territories to muster economic support for his enterprise

of creating an Indigenous territory that was independent, but allied with

Britain, with him at its head. He had five supposedly Native chiefs

accompany him and visited Canada and Great Britain in 1791, at a time

when relations between Spain and Britain were not at their best. As a

result, he did, this time, receive a small consignment with which to arm

the Indigenous people.122

Better equipped, he returned to La Florida in 1792 with the intention of

attacking Panton, Leslie and Company, to which Spain had given a

monopoly on trade with the Native population, since this was

122 Din, G. C. (2010), “William Augustus Bowles on the Gulf Coast, 1787-1803:

Unraveling a Labyrinthine Conumdrum”, The Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 89,

No. 1, pp. 1-25, pp. 5-10.

68

jeopardizing the interests of his patrons.123 The Spanish, alarmed by

Bowles’ attacks on the company, ordered his arrest, which was carried

out in the fort of San Marcos de Apalache in February 1792. He was

sent to Madrid, where he was imprisoned for two years, after which he

was deported to a prison in Manila for fifteen months, after a journey

of over a year between Spain and the Philippines. When he was

returning to the Iberian Peninsula, he managed to escape just off the

African coast, before heading to London, where he would arrive in

1798.124

During the time he spent as a prisoner, Bowles had been fleshing out

his idea of creating an independent Muskogee state, and returned to La

Florida in 1799 with that in mind. He soon gained the sympathy of the

Maroons who, disillusioned with the Spanish government, joined his

militias of Indigenous people and landless Britons. Bowles would make

two of these ex-slaves, Prince and Héctor, his trusted interpreters, with

the mission of strengthening the bonds between Native and Black

people.

The British encouraged the creation and maintenance of this state,

seeing it as a means of destabilizing the Spanish colony and gaining

military positions, in a scheme focused on recuperating some of the land

lost in the American War of Independence. Bowles led a militia of

around four hundred men and, noting Spain’s passive response, took

the fort of San Marcos de Apalache and thereby divided La Florida,

leaving San Agustín in the east and Panzacola in the west.

This was a critical moment when it seemed that the State of Muskogee

could take on a stable form. However, the peace settlement between

Spain, France and Britain in 1802 put an end to British support for the

cause, meaning that Bowles, without the arms and food they had

provided, could not keep the promises he had made to the Indigenous

people of securing continuous supplies to sustain their conflict with the

Spanish, giving him a reputation as a liar. His former Indigenous allies,

spurred on by a lucrative reward, took Bowles prisoner in May 1803

and handed him over to the Spanish authorities, who sent him to Cuba,

123 White, D. H. (1975), “The Spaniards and William Augustus Bowles in Florida,

1799-1803”, The Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 145-155, p. 145.

124 Din, G. C. (2010), p. 12.

69

where he would remain captive in the Castillo de la Cabaña until his

death two years later.125

The expansionist pillaging engaged in by the United States led colonists

in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama to make incursions into La Florida,

driven by increasingly intense competition in their territories, in order

to seize lands and capture Maroons. The North American government

encouraged these attacks and even engaged undercover agents whose

mission was to stir up the colonists of La Florida, in the hope that they

would rise up against the Spanish government and demand the

territory’s incorporation into the United States. Given that the US did

not want to enter into conflict with a nation that had been an ally in its

struggle for independence, its goal was for the inhabitants themselves

to call to become Americans, alluding to Spain’s poor governance.

The Washington government had its sights set on La Florida, with a

public message focused on claiming sovereignty over that territory so

that they could counter a hypothetical British invasion. However, the

real rationale was to exploit Spain’s weakness to take possession of its

territory and eliminate the safe haven created for Maroons in La Florida

given that, despite the withdrawal of the royal decree of 1693, slaves

fleeing from the north continued to arrive. They were drawn by the

continued sense of freedom in San Agustín, where there was a large

Black population who had been granted their liberty by the Spanish and

were integrated into the structures of the city, and in the Indigenous

settlements where Seminole and Black Seminole people shared food,

defenses and everyday life.

Large communal meals were an integral part of life in these settlements,

and were very much to the liking of the Black Seminole residents, dance

being an important part of the event, accompanied by music “play’d on

a crack’d fiddle and tin pan.”126

These were quite common instruments in the music played by African

Americans in other regions, using European instruments such as the

violin, and other improvised instruments made from odds and ends such

as pots, pans or buckets.

125 Ibid. pp.14-15.

126 Morgan, A. A. (2020), p. 27.

70

Another description of musical instruments used by the Black Seminole

people for their dances was provided by a North American soldier

inspecting the Maroon village of Pilaklikaha after its destruction during

a military operation: “a ball stick, an Indian flute, and small gopher

shells, or box-turtle, with rattling Indian shot, or palmetto seed: the

music of their dance.”127 In this case, the instruments in question were

typically Native ones made from animal- and plant-based materials,

which had been adopted by the Black Seminoles to perform their music.

The Black Seminoles took part in the dances performed by the

Indigenous people, as a Black man named Alex Brackston recalled:

Negro Alex Brackston related how as a youth he used to go to the

Creek busk and stomp dance, where Indians tied shells on their ankles

and beat drums while the medicine man distributed black drink.128

This description tells us that it was routine for such a man to be invited

to these healer-led ceremonies, in which the dance was accompanied by

the beat of drums, as were the Voodoo ceremonies of Haiti, Martinique

and Louisiana. A black drink is also mentioned in the description, called

Asi Yahola by the Seminole people: it was made from a type of holly

native to the region that has a high caffeine content, and was used in

rituals in which the drink was shared while participants chanted and

danced.

According to E. Urlin, the tribal dances of the Black Seminoles would

give rise to the cakewalk: a common dance in the North American

plantations consisting of partners dancing in a procession, with the most

graceful couple winning a cake made from corn and decorated with

pumpkin leaves.

It [cakewalk] originated in Florida, where it said that the Negroes

borrowed the idea of it from the war dances of the Seminoles, an

almost extinct Indian tribe. The Negroes were present as spectators at

these dances, which consisted of wild and hilarious jumping and

127 Ibid. p. 30.

128 Kokomoor, K. (2009), “A Re-assessment of Seminoles, Africans, and Slavery on

the Florida Frontier”, The Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 2, pp. 209-236,

p. 228.

71

gyrating, alternating with slow processions in which the dancers

walked solemnly in couples.129

Urlin paints a picture in which Black people watched this Seminole war

dance as spectators and would then use the idea in their own dances.

We can pick out several errors in Urlin’s narrative that, nevertheless,

do not invalidate his account of Native influence on African American

dances.

Firstly, Black Seminole people would not be mere spectators but, as

noted above, participated earnestly in these dances as members of the

tribe. A narrative by William Simmons, who was present at one of these

dances, stressed that Native and Black people danced together although,

as Simmons described, the former did so with grace and elegance, while

the latter made some strange and more vulgar movements.

Secondly, Urlin uses the category “war dance” whereas, according to

the aforementioned account by Alex Brackston, these dances

corresponded to what was many American Indian communities’ most

important celebration: the Green Corn Dance. 130

It might have been Black people from outside the tribe who were

watching these scenes and would take with them a more comic and, in

Simmons’ words, vulgar version of these dances to the rest of the

American territory, where they would prove a hit and form the basis for

many African American dances by the end of the nineteenth century.

Returning to the pressure the United States was exerting on the Spanish

territory of La Florida, there were two further attempts at annexation in

this period. These initially sprang from private initiatives with no

connection to the Washington government, but the government would

subsequently make use of them, ultimately to expel the Spanish from

the Florida peninsula.

The first was the proclamation of the Republic of West Florida on

September 26, 1810, on the strip of land between the Perdido River, to

the west of Panzacola, and the Mississippi River and Pearl River (then

the río Perla), which marked the border with Louisiana. This operation

was spearheaded by the Kemper brothers, a family from the Baton

129 Urlin, E. (1912), Dancing, ancient and modern, D. Appleton & Company, p. 13.

130 Kokomoor, K. (2009), p. 228.

72

Rouge region who had been annexing Indigenous lands for their own

use since 1804, and were looking for a way to have their ownership of

these lands recognized and legalized. They spent the first part of 1810

plotting with other landowners, who saw this as a unique opportunity

to expand their properties, before taking control of the fort at Baton

Rouge and declaring themselves an independent republic, then

immediately calling for annexation to the United States to protect

themselves from potential Spanish reprisals.

A militia led by Reuben Kemper set out from Baton Rouge with the

intention of taking Mobila (today’s city of Mobile) and Panzacola, but

they were fended off by the Spanish. The US president, James Madison,

took advantage of the crisis to offer himself as guarantor of the pro-

American inhabitants of La Florida and prepare for annexation of the

Republic of West Florida as part of the Mississippi Territory. Despite

opposition from part of Congress, who saw this illegal act as a

provocation that could lead to war with a foreign power, Madison

pushed forward and took control of Biloxi, pointing to a

misinterpretation of the Louisiana Purchase document, according to

which West Florida would be included within the boundaries of

Louisiana. Whatever the truth of the matter may have been, the

annexation went ahead, ending with the takeover of Mobila by General

Wilkinson in 1813.131

Owing to the success of the operation in West Florida, the United States

began to prepare the ground for replicating it with the annexation of

East Florida. In this case, as well as occupying land, the primary

motivation was catching slaves: in the years when La Florida had been

a safe haven for them, it had become a tempting prize for plantation

owners in the neighboring states, added to which a free Black

population in La Florida continued to pose a danger because of their

pull effect and potential to inspire plantation slaves to rise up in arms.

Planning for the operation had begun as early as February 1811,

including the appointment of agents whose goal was to incite a revolt

among the inhabitants of La Florida, so that they would call for

assistance from the North American federal government. By March

1812, the governor of Georgia, General Matthews, had recruited a force

of 350 volunteers from the Georgia landowners – the self-proclaimed

131 Wasserman, A. (2010), pp. 138-139.

73

Patriots – who were joined by around 50 citizens of La Florida. On

March 16, the Patriots began their siege of the town of Fernandina on

Amelia Island, on the north coast of La Florida, initiating what would

become known as the Patriot War. The presence of several American

warships in the vicinity of Fernandina accelerated the surrender of the

town by the Spanish.

The Patriots dedicated the following weeks to their true objective,

launching a campaign of slave catching and raiding across the north of

the territory. Many colonists, fearful of the actions carried out by the

gangs of Patriots, decided to abandon their plantations and seek shelter

in San Agustín, leaving their slaves helpless before the slave catchers,

leading many to flee to the inland swamps to avoid capture. On April 8,

confident that the military force in San Agustín would be limited in

number, the Patriots took up position in Fort Mose with the intention of

taking over the city.

However, the Patriots did not foresee that San Agustín would be

defended by a militia of free Black men from the city, as well as

Maroons, Seminoles and Black Seminoles from the surrounding area,

who saw how an American conquest of the city could jeopardize their

free lifestyle. These militiamen of color would put every last ounce of

energy into repelling the Patriots’ attempts to take the city, since their

lives and those of their families depended on their success.

The garrison of St. A. were not inactive spectators of their enemies,

several sorties were made particularly by a non-commissioned black

officer called Prince, who in one of his recounters carried off the

whole of the enemy’s forage, killed the commanding officer and three

of his men, and wounded many of the remainder of the foraging

party.132

The arrival of a new governor of La Florida, Sebastián Kindelán, gave

a boost to the Spanish defense, when he built a united front with the

Seminole people to put an end to the Patriots’ incursion.

On September 27, 1812, the Patriots attacked the region of Alachua,

where Paynes Town – the settlement of the Seminole leader, Chief

Payne – was located, with the aim of diverting Seminole attention

132 Miller, J. (1819), Narrative of a Voyage to the Spanish Main: In the Ship “Two

Friends”, John Miller, p. 123.

74

toward this area, so they could evacuate the Patriot troops stationed

around San Agustín. There were several days of clashes between the

American soldiers and the Seminoles and Black Seminoles, causing

many casualties on both sides.

Among those killed was Chief Payne, whose death was a severe blow

to the Seminole and Black Seminole people. In the meetings that ensued

between the tribal chiefs, it was agreed that the Seminoles would remain

in the territory under the command of Payne’s brother, Billy Bolek,

called Billy Bowlegs by the whites, while the Black Seminoles would

emigrate to the south, toward the region of Tampa Bay, which was far

enough away from the North Americans to be safe. There they would

found the prosperous Black community of Sarrazota, which would take

in Black people fleeing from the numerous conflicts waged against

whites in the ensuing years.133

The defense of San Agustín meant that the conflict would not be

resolved quickly, as it had in West Florida, so the American government

withdrew its support for the Patriots in April 1813, recognizing the

borders preceding the conflict. Given that the United States was in the

midst of war against the British in 1812, it was not desirable to have

another front open against the Spanish at the rear.

Nevertheless, the Patriots kept up their raids into Spanish territory,

stealing cattle, capturing Black people and destroying Seminole

settlements. On January 25, 1814, after occupying the land abandoned

by Chief Payne’s people a year earlier, they declared the Republic of

East Florida, requesting the United States’ support, as had occurred in

West Florida. However, this time, the North American government

rejected this course of action, since it was not in its interests to increase

tensions with Spain at the time. The Spanish governor of La Florida

made a peace offer to the Patriots in 1816, extending the possibility of

self-governance if they renounced their independent Republic. These

terms were accepted, bringing the conflict to a close.134

The root cause of the attacks on Spanish sovereignty in West and East

Florida were, as noted above, the private interest of Southern

133 Brown, C. Jr. (1990), “The “Sarrazota, or Runaway Negro Plantations”: Tampa

Bay’s First Black Community, 1812-1821”, Tampa Bay History, Vol. 12, Iss. 2, Art.3,

p. 2.

134 Wasserman, A. (2010), pp. 141-162.

75

landowners in seizing lands and capturing Black people to incorporate

into their plantations as slaves, supported by the state. This had the

effect of cementing the relationship between Seminole and Black

Seminole people over these years, since both groups felt threatened: one

by the loss of territories upon which they had been settled for years, and

the others by the loss of their freedom. Another Native tribe scarred by

its relationship with the United States would join these two groups: the

Red Sticks.

In the same period, and within the context of the ramifications felt after

the 1812 war between Great Britain and the United States, a group of

Creek people commanded by Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief, initiated a

campaign to try to convince the whole tribe of the need to resist

European acculturation, using weapons again the whites if necessary.

Natural phenomena, such as a comet and an earthquake, fired up the

prophets who accompanied Tecumseh, charging the atmosphere to the

point at which an attack was launched against the Creeks who did not

support confrontation with the whites.

This conflict is known as the Creek War and the faction that followed

Tecumseh were called the Red Sticks, because of their ritual weapon of

a red-painted club, symbolizing ongoing war. The Red Sticks were

supported by the British, while the rest of the Creek people received

North American support.

Between 1813 and 1814, there were clashes between these two factions

in their ancestral territories of Alabama and Georgia. The evolution of

this war would be similar to that of the colonial powers, with clear

superiority on the North American side, who had a brilliant officer in

their ranks that would play a key role in the future of the tribes living in

La Florida: General Andrew Jackson.

The final battle between Jackson’s troops – made up of regular soldiers,

militias of volunteers from Tennessee and Native allies – and the Red

Sticks, took place at Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814 and resulted

in the defeat of the Red Sticks. Around a thousand warriors then

withdrew into the territory of La Florida, where they would bolster the

ranks of the Seminole people.135

135 Brown, C. Jr. (1990), p. 2.

76

The Creek allies of General Jackson had no better luck: he made them

sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson, citing the need to ensure US security as

justification. This compelled them to give the North Americans their

land, amounting to almost 8.5 million hectares, or half the current state

of Alabama.

Applying Manifest Destiny in La Florida: The First Seminole War

In the summer of 1814, as part of their operations in the War of 1812

between Britain and the United States, two British military officers,

Edward Nicolls and George Woodbine, started a campaign to win over

the American Indians and Maroons of La Florida as allies for their

cause. Nicolls and Woodbine convinced the Red Sticks who had fled

the Creek civil war to gather at an area on the banks of the Apalachicola

River known as Prospect Bluff, approximately 120 miles east of

Panzacola. They also offered slaves who joined the Corps of Colonial

Marines their liberty, which led several hundred slaves from Panzacola,

Mobila, San Agustín and the territory of Georgia to agree to settle at

Prospect Bluff.

Nicolls and Woodbine ordered a small fort to be built and the

community around it began to prosper from cultivating corn on the

surrounding land and trade. One year after it was founded, there were

already close to 1,100 soldiers, most of whom were Black, who had

come with their families looking for the protection they could not find

elsewhere, which led to it receiving the name of Negro Fort.

The influence the fort may have over other slaves in US territory and

the precedent this could set prompted General Jackson to demand that

the Spanish government take action to retrieve the fugitive slaves and

destroy the fort. Meanwhile, Woodbine, who was responsible for the

Corps of Colonial Marines and relations with foreign powers, was

lodging complaints about the attacks being carried out by the Patriots

against the Seminole villages.

The Americans built Fort Scott upriver of Prospect Bluff and, although

the waters in question were Spanish, transport to the American fort

passed in front of Negro Fort, which was clearly intended to provoke

an attack from the fort against one of the convoys traveling to Fort Scott.

Tensions continued to build until, in 1816, an attack was launched from

the Negro Fort against a transportation boat and, in light of Spain’s

77

inaction, Jackson gave the order to Lieutenant Colonel Duncan L.

Clinch to carry out a reprisal operation that was to end with the fort’s

destruction. Clinch had a company of Coweta Creek people go with

him, and they traveled downstream along the bank of the Apalachicola

River while two gunboats journeyed upstream to provide support.136

The fort housed a significant number of Seminole and Maroon soldiers,

who had been training for months and had enough weapons and

supplies for a large-scale defensive operation. When the battle began on

July 27, 1816, there were several skirmishes between the defenders and

the Creek warriors allied to the Americans, but nothing that hinted at

the sudden, bloody climax of the siege: a shot from one of the gunboats

hit the fort’s powder magazine, blowing the entire complex to

smithereens. This description of the scene after the explosion reveals

the horror that ensued:

The explosion was awful and the scene horrible beyond description.

You cannot conceive, nor I describe the horrors of the scene. In an

instant lifeless bodies were stretched upon the plain, buried in sand or

rubbish, or suspended from the tops of the surrounding pines. Here

lay an innocent babe, there a helpless mother; on the one side a sturdy

warrior, on the other a bleeding squaw. Piles of bodies, large heaps of

sand, broken glass, accoutrements, etc., covered the site of the fort...

Our first care, on arriving at the scene of the destruction, was to rescue

and relieve the unfortunate beings who survived the explosion.137

Of the more than three hundred people occupying the fort at that time,

including a large number of women and girls, only around forty

survived the explosion. The leaders of the fort’s garrison, a member of

the Choctaw tribe and a Black man called Garçon, were among the

survivors, although they were handed over to the Creek and

subsequently scalped. Of the other survivors, those who were severely

wounded were executed on the spot, while those in better condition

were returned to their owners or sold as slaves.138

136 Landers, J. (2003), “Cimarrones africanos e indios en la frontera española con los

Estados Unidos. El caso de los Seminoles negros de La Florida” (trans. Mejía Pavony,

G. R.), Memoria & Sociedad, No. 15, pp. 25-36, pp. 29-30.

137 Federal Writers' Project (1939), Florida. A Guide to the Southernmost State,

Oxford University Press, p. 489.

138 Wasserman, A. (2010), pp. 161-174.

78

The community living in the area around the fort fled in the chaos that

ensued immediately after the explosion. Close to eighty Black Seminole

people left, shown the way by Woodbine, to join the Maroon

community of Sarrazota created in the Tampa Bay region after Chief

Payne’s town was destroyed.139 Others were taken in British boats to

the Bahamas, where they established themselves on the north of Andros

Island in a settlement known as Nicholls Town, in honor of Edward

Nicolls.140 However, the vast majority of those able to escape headed

to the east, into the heart of La Florida, settling in a community that had

flourished on the banks of the Suwannee River, where the Seminoles

who followed Bowlegs after their defeat at Paynes Town had taken

refuge.141

In November 1817, using the excuse that a group of Seminoles and

Black Seminoles in a settlement upstream on the Apalachicola River

were preparing to avenge the Negro Fort massacre, a detachment from

Fort Scott attacked the community, in what is considered the beginning

of the First Seminole War.142

The Seminoles, led by the Indigenous Chief Bowlegs and the Black

leader Nero, decided to take action and organize a guerrilla campaign

to face off the slave catchers from Georgia who were taking advantage

of the situation to increase their profits. Over the course of 1817, the

rebel tactics consisted of small-scale attacks against plantations on

borderland territory in order to steal supplies and free slaves.143

Now engaged in open warfare with the group of Native and Black

warriors, General Jackson entered into La Florida in April 1818 to carry

out an act of retaliation against these unruly Seminoles, Red Sticks and

Black Seminoles, who had crossed a red line when they attacked a party

of soldiers on a mission to reinforce American positions after the Negro

Fort massacre.

139 Brown, C. Jr. (1990), p. 2.

140 Millett, N. (2013), The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in

the Atlantic World, University Press of Florida, p. 129.

141 Covington, J. W. (1967), p. 355.

142 Morgan, A. A. (2020), pp. 49-50.

143 Kai, N. (2015), “Black Seminoles: the maroons of Florida”, African and Black

Diaspora: An International Journal, Vol. 8, p. 12.

79

Some months later, the two sides fought the Battle of Suwannee River:

the site of Bowlegs’ headquarters. Jackson deployed a large number of

American troops and Creek allies in this battle, with the intention of

destroying the Indigenous settlement and capturing the Black people

taking refuge there. In the defensive action employed by Bowlegs, some

of his warriors kept the enemy soldiers occupied while the women and

children fled on the other side of the river, enabling them to escape with

their lives.

This group of Seminoles and Black Seminoles sought refuge in the

south with the Sarrazota community. There, alongside those who had

fled during the Patriot War and the survivors of the Negro Fort

massacre, they had hopes of being able to live in peace, far away from

the North Americans and their incessant search for new lands and Black

slaves.

The Tampa region community was called Angola by the Cuban

fishermen who had set up some ranchos on the coast. These ranchos

were small semi-permanent settlements where the fishermen prepared

and dried the season’s catches. Some fishermen preferred to spend the

whole year in the ranchos rather than return to Cuba when the fishing

season ended, developing closer relations with the Seminole people in

the Sarrazota region as a result, in some cases even entering into long-

term relationships with Native or African-American women. The

fishermen also provided work to the newly arrived Seminoles, whether

in the fishing boats themselves or as suppliers of products from the land,

such as game meat, hides and fruit.144

For a time, the community of Angola prospered, thanks to its distance

from the Americans, the fertility of its soil and Caribbean trade, not only

with the aforementioned Cuban fishermen but also with the Bahamian

wreckers who were operating in the region. The British and Spanish,

seeing that the town of Angola could prove a real headache for the

Americans, provided them with a large quantity of arms, lead for bullets

and gunpowder with which to defend themselves from American

incursions.145

Jackson used the momentum gained from a run of successful actions

against the Native population to go one step further in the liberation of

144 Covington, J. W. (1967), p. 352.

145 Wasserman, A. (2010), pp. 193-198.

80

La Florida and take the fort of San Marcos de Apalache, where he

captured and executed one of the Red Stick prophets, Hillis Hadjo, who

had accompanied Tecumseh at the start of the Creek War.146

It was on this site that Jackson would convene a military tribunal to try

two subjects of the British Crown, Robert Ambrister and Alexander

Arbuthnot, who were accused of assisting the Seminoles. Ambrister

originated from the Bahamas and had worked with Nicolls and

Woodbine on setting up the Corps of Colonial Marines, as well as the

support they provided to the Seminole people. Arbuthnot was Scottish

by birth and worked in trade; as someone with strong abolitionist

sympathies, he joined Ambrister, Woodbine and MacGregor to help

support the Native cause.

The summary trial found both guilty and they were hung. The British

and Spanish responses took a severe tone, viewing the execution of two

British citizens on Spanish soil by a North American tribunal as a

wholesale contravention of international law, although their complaints

became less strident in light of the meager opposition the Europeans

could mount on the land against Jackson’s continued aggressions.

After taking the fort of San Marcos de Apalache, Jackson repeated the

action at Panzacola, before setting his sights on San Agustín and even

Cuba, for good measure, to force the Spanish out of North America for

good.

However, President Monroe had other plans, since he was still

unconvinced that a military operation would be free of repercussions,

so he ordered Jackson to return the sites taken from the Spanish. The

negotiations behind closed doors bore fruit and the Spanish finally

succumbed to the military and diplomatic pressure, agreeing to cede La

Florida (thereafter, Florida) to the United States of America. The

Adams-Onis Treaty established the liberty and rights of all Florida’s

inhabitants.

The inhabitants of the territories which his Catholic Majesty cedes to

the United States, by this treaty, shall be incorporated in the Union of

the United States, as soon as may be consistent with the principles of

the Federal Constitution, and admitted to the enjoyment of all the

146 Landers, J. (2003), p. 31.

81

privileges, rights, and immunities, of the citizens of the United

States.147

However, the reality was quite different, given that the Seminoles were

considered part of the Creek tribe, to whom they were expected to

submit, despite the years of clashes between them, and the Black

Seminoles were considered runaway slaves who should be returned to

their masters.

When the Spanish ceded the territory, many of the Black people from

San Agustín – both Maroons and free citizens – decided to flee to

Havana, as they felt safer and better treated under the Spanish than the

Americans. There are records in 1820 of a large group of Black people

from San Agustín arriving in Guanabacoa, where there were already

immigrants originating in Florida who had fled during the raids of 1704

and when the territory was transferred to the British in 1763.148

In 1821, Florida was officially handed over, with Jackson appointed

governor under the title of Commissioner of the United States.

The Black Seminole diaspora. First destination: The Bahamas

Andrew Jackson’s attitude toward the Black and Indian problem in

Florida, according to which the groups of independent Natives were

hampering efforts to control the territory, which had become a haven

for runaway slaves, was not the product of objective reasoning alone. It

became clear that Jackson’s approach toward the non-white inhabitants

of Florida was informed by hatred when the only solution he was able

to identify was the total annihilation of the Native population and the

apprehension of every last Black person in the territory.

In this spirit, when the First Seminole War ended and Florida became a

North American territory, Jackson sent out a party of Coweta allies, as

he had already done at Prospect Bluff, to destroy any remaining

settlements after the flight of the Seminoles and Black Seminoles to the

south of the peninsula. Among the communities obliterated was the

147 Mahon, J. K. (1962), “The Treaty of Moultrie Creek, 1823”, The Florida Historical

Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 350-372, p. 351.

148 Dixon, A. E. (2007), Black Seminole involvement and leadership during the Second

Seminole War, 1835-1842, Thesis, Indiana University, p. 25.

82

prosperous town of Angola, prompting the Red Sticks remaining in that

region and the Black Seminoles to flee.

The Red Sticks moved to the area around the source of the Peace River,

where they founded the settlement of Minatti. The Black Seminole

people decided to travel even further, taking refuge in Cape Florida, the

southern tip of Key Biscayne and meeting place for Blacks, Natives and

castaways, while others built canoes with which to hide away in the

Florida Keys, before traveling in them to the Bahamas.

Two parties of Black Seminoles went to New Providence, the most

important island in the Bahamas – one in 1819 and the other in 1821 –

with the intention of seeking asylum as recompense for the support the

Seminoles had given the British Crown during the War of 1812. The

Bahamas governor denied their request and the Native people had to

return to Florida.

They wasted no time in organizing a clandestine trip for later in 1821,

assisted by people of low moral standing such as Captain Simonds, one

of the many Bahamian pirates and wreckers who operated on the coasts

and cays of Florida and had no scruples about trading in slaves.

One of the first groups to reach the Bahamas was that commanded by

Scipio Bowlegs, who led between 100 and 150 Black Native people.

The Black Seminoles arrived on Andros Island, where they founded a

settlement known as Red Bays in the northwest of the island, around

twelve miles west of their first settlement, Nicholls Town, which had

been established by people from Prospect Bluff after the Negro Fort

massacre. Other smaller parties would later arrive at the Joulter Cays,

north of the island, but they soon moved to Red Bays to join the larger

group.149

The region around Red Bays had previously been uninhabited, and

nobody in the Bahamas found out about the arrival of these people for

seven years. When they entered into contact with the Black Seminoles

in 1828, the British thought they were Black people who had been

brought there by the Spanish to be sent to Cuba and sold as slaves at a

later date. The British decided that the best course of action to prevent

the Spanish from returning for these people was to take them prisoner

149 Goggin, J. M. (1945), “The Seminole Negroes of Andros Island, Bahamas”, The

Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 201-206, p. 204.

83

and move them to Nassau. They were imprisoned there for a year, until

they were able to demonstrate that they were Seminole people

originating in Florida who had fled North American persecution and

been freed.150

The Black Seminoles returned to Andros Island, where they lived in

almost complete isolation from the outside world until the twentieth

century, cultivating the corn, bean and squash seeds they had brought

with them from Florida. They also engaged in hunting and bowfishing,

and due to their traditional Seminole dress, became known as the “wild

Indians” of Andros Island.

Alan Lomax made a trip to the Bahamas in 1935, alongside Mary

Elizabeth Barnicle, and in Nassau heard stories that there were Black

people living on Andros Island, whom the other Black communities

feared, and that all of these Indians were called Bowlegs. When Lomax

recounted this to the anthropologist Kenneth Porter in the 1940s, Porter

immediately identified the typically Seminole surname that originated

with the great warrior, Billy Bowlegs, and concluded that it couldn’t be

an invention or a coincidence. We can therefore say that the group of

Black Seminole people who migrated to the Bahamas were discovered

by Western anthropology, thanks to Alan Lomax.151

Alan Lomax made recordings in several parts of the Bahamian

archipelago, tracing parallels with the colonial music of the mainland,

given that the islands’ proximity facilitated the movement of people and

cultural and musical influences between the two locations. However,

Lomax’s fieldwork on Andros Island and Cat Island provides us with a

magnificent opportunity to listen to songs that were untainted by

external influences from 1821 to 1935 since, as noted above, Andros

Island was an infrequently visited site, even by Bahamians themselves.

These songs – spirituals brought with the Black Seminole people in

their flight from Florida – were not learned when living alongside the

Seminole people, but dated back to the years when their ancestors were

slaves on the plantations of Georgia and the Carolinas, enabling us to

150 Howard, R. (2006), “The “Wild Indians” of Andros Island: Black Seminole Legacy

in the Bahamas”, Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 275-298, pp. 280, 282.

151 Porter, K. (1945), “Notes on Seminole Negroes in the Bahamas”, The Florida

Historical Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 55-60, p. 55.

84

venture that these sounds must be very close to those heard in the

plantation cabins at the end of the eighteenth century.

Many of the songs recorded by Lomax were performed by sailors and

sponge fishers, who sang these shanties during their work day, while it

was in the religious ceremonies that the spirituals were performed. Of

the 24 songs on the record that compiles this work, the following are

particularly worth highlighting: Blow, Liza Blow, performed by a group

of men; Round the Bay of Mexico, sung by Henry Lundy; Stand Up

From Below by Zacharias Green, and I May Be Gone by Cleveland

Simmons.

Lomax also found a trace of the Black Seminoles in Nassau, where a

singer going by the name of Mr. Bowlegs volunteered to record several

singles, such as Long Time Ago and Jump Up, Joe.

The musicologist Sam Charters also visited the island in 1958,

coinciding with a festival celebrating emancipation from slavery.

Consequently, there was an intent behind the music he encountered that

was very different to the songs of work and prayer recorded by Lomax

twenty years earlier. Exogenous influences can also be heard that enrich

the sound.

Charters managed to record a dance group from Fresh Creek: one of the

other communities in which the Black Seminoles settled. Songs in the

rake-and-scrape style stand out, such as Gal, You Want to Go Back to

Scambo and Everything the Monkey Do, although the collection also

includes harmonica players such as Charles Bastian with Under the

Precious Blood, a musician called Joseph Green playing the fife in the

song I Drink All the Rum and Never Get Drunk and several brass bands,

such as the Daniel Saunders Brass Band and St. Bartholomew’s

Friendly Society Brass Band.

In 1965, it was Jody Stecher who would travel to the Bahamas to record

local artists. She found a singer from Andros Island named Edith

Pinder, whom she recorded performing a range of spirituals, singing

alongside her husband Raymond and her daughter Geneva, and

accompanied by Edith’s brother, Joseph Spence, who was also born on

Andros Island and was one of the most important guitarists in the

Bahamas, later being cited as an influence by musicians such as Taj

Mahal, Ry Cooder and Jerry García.

85

Destroying the Seminole population and capturing the Blacks: the

Second Seminole War

The systematic campaign to destroy Florida’s Indigenous settlements

launched by Andrew Jackson resulted in the largest groups that had not

yet escaped becoming cornered in the south of the peninsula.

Eventually, the Treaty of Moultrie Creek between the United States

government and representatives of the Seminole people was signed in

1823. According to the treaty, an Indian reservation would be

established in the center of the Florida peninsula, where the Seminoles

should settle. This reservation had no connection to the east and west

coasts, to prevent the Seminole people from contacting the Cuban

fishermen with their coastal ranchos and the Bahamians, whom the

North Americans suspected were providing the rebels with weapons

and ammunition. The treaty stipulated that the United States would

provide the Seminole people with land, tools and protection, if they

would agree to stay within the limits of the reservation, forgo making

claims over other territories in Florida, and capture and hand over any

Black people who entered the reservation. The objective was twofold:

to control the Seminoles, and to create enmity with their Black allies.152

The Seminoles soon realized what a bad deal they had struck, since the

reservation was located in an undesirable region of little utility: the soil

was infertile, there was no water course within the reservation and the

water from the wells that had been dug made people sick.153

Collectives of Indian chiefs then formed, visiting Washington with the

intention of resolving a situation that was causing them to die of hunger,

having been condemned to live on a barren land. Obviously, the

landowners who had already taken possession of the choicest lands in

Florida vehemently opposed any solution that involved having to return

that which had never been theirs but which Jackson’s war had enabled

them to acquire. The proposed resolution to the conflict was the

expulsion of the Native people to the west of the Mississippi River,

promoted by Jackson, who was now President of the United States and

had signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, enabling the federal

152 Mahon, J. K. (1962), pp. 370-371.

153 Wasserman, A. (2010), p. 216.

86

government to negotiate with the Seminole people to secure their forced

relocation.

In 1832, the Seminoles were called to Payne’s Landing in Oklahoma,

the intention being to offer them relocation to that region, where the

Creek people had already been moved, with the added condition that

they would have to hand over all the Black people who lived with them.

Some Seminole chiefs signed the treaty, but they reneged on it upon

returning to Florida, since the lands offered were no better than those

they already had, to which was added the age-old Seminole conflict

with the Creeks, and the strong ties that bound them to the Black

Seminoles.

The Seminole people’s opposition to deportation led the North

Americans to apply more pressure: they considered the treaty valid, so

saw themselves as justified in pursuing and attacking any Seminoles

they found in Florida.

Some chiefs, such as Osceola, paid secret visits to the sugar plantations

in the area around St. Johns River, to the north and west of the city of

St. Augustine (San Agustín, during Spanish rule), aiming to finding

slaves willing to join forces with them and the Black Seminoles in

fighting against the white man.

Between 500 and 1,000 slaves from the Florida plantations joined the

revolt that would give rise to the Second Seminole War: a substantial

number, considering that the number of Black Seminoles did not reach

500. This demonstrates the importance slaves had in this war, not only

in terms of numbers, but because slaves had a lot to lose if their uprising

was not successful.154

The slave revolt began on December 26, 1835 and, through the month

of January, sixteen of the largest and most productive plantations in the

US were reduced to ashes, which spread panic among the owners about

the prospect of a general revolt akin to the one that had occurred in

Haiti.

In an apparently well-planned movement, only three days after the

uprising in the St. Johns River plantations, the Seminoles, led by Chiefs

Micanopy and Tiger Tall, ambushed a party of 110 soldiers who had set

154 Porter, K. (1964), p. 429.

87

out from Fort Brooke, commanded by Colonel Francis Dade. The attack

turned into a massacre, with a survivor from the US party describing

the horrific scenes he had lived through and how the soldiers’ bodies

were mutilated. This battle is known as the Dade Massacre and may be

considered the first skirmish of the Second Seminole War.

By December 1936, one year after the war began, General Thomas

Jesup was convinced that this was not an “Indian war” but a “Negro”

one:

This you may be assured, is a Negro, not an Indian war; and if it be

not speedily put down, the south will feel the effects of it on their slave

population before the end of the next season.155

The war was progressing well for the coalition of Seminoles, Black

Seminoles and fugitive plantation slaves, due to the rapid strikes they

were able to deliver, helped as they were by terrain and climatic

conditions that favored small, mobile groups over the inflexible

American battalions. There was a steady trickle of US casualties and

the North American troops were unable to find the Seminole bases in

the center of Florida, where their attacks were being launched.

All the peace talks held required the Seminoles to hand over the Black

people fighting alongside them: both the slaves who had escaped in the

revolts around Christmas 1835, and Black Seminoles who had been

living with the Indigenous group for several generations but who were

nevertheless viewed as the descendants of past runaway slaves.

With the war causing the US to hemorrhage lives and money, General

Jesup was backed into a corner, and offered the Seminole people a

treaty in March 1837 allowing them to take their Black allies with them

if they accepted expatriation to the west. The month of June was set as

a deadline for the Native people to gather at Fort Brooke, close to

Tampa.

The Seminole and their allies who come in and emigrate to the west,

shall be secure in their lives and property; that their negroes, their

bone fide property, would accompany them to the west.156

155 Wasserman, A. (2010), p. 250.

156 Wasserman, A. (2010), p. 270.

88

However, this treaty was not to the liking of the slave owners, who

demanded the return of the slaves who had escaped in the St. Johns

River revolt. There were constant visits from slave catchers to Fort

Brooke and it was not uncommon for them to leave with a Black person

they had managed to identify as a fugitive slave. Jesup succumbed to

the pressure from the plantation owners and asked the Seminoles and

Black Seminoles who had already gathered at Fort Brooke to, at least,

hand over those who had escaped in the St. Johns River revolts. Some

chiefs gave in, wishing to get away from the war, but the Black

Seminole people began to suspect that their safety was not guaranteed,

so nearly all of them escaped Fort Brooke to return inland and take up

arms again.

Little by little, the momentum that the slaves’ revolt at St. Johns River

had brought to the war began to dissipate. Jesup had changed the North

American approach to war, carrying out small-scale operations against

the Seminole communities that were more effective in a guerrilla war.

Further, many Black people had decided to voluntarily return to the

plantations they had fled from, seeing life as a slave as preferable to life

in the swamps in a state of permanent war against the North Americans.

Nevertheless, Jesup believed that the ultimate objective of the conflict,

which was to neutralize the negative influence that Florida could have

over slaves in neighboring territories, could only be achieved by

completely crushing the resistance put up by Seminoles and Black

Seminoles. After the Fort Brooke episode, Jesup felt he could not take

the chiefs at their word, so he came up with a plan to invite all the chiefs

to a peace negotiation and apprehend them, forcing them to accept

unconditional surrender. Chief King Philip and Chief Osceola, along

with their lieutenants, Wild Cat – a Seminole and son of King Philip –

and Juan Cavallo, a Black Seminole also known as John Horse or

Gopher John, were imprisoned in St. Augustine’s Fort Marion (today

known by its original name, Castillo de San Marcos).157

Horse and Wild Cat came up with a plan, the account of which has more

to do with Seminole mythology than history. According to the narrative

recounted by Wild Cat and Horse themselves, they led twenty prisoners

in their escape through a window located high up in the cell and nearly

50 feet above the fort’s moat. The window was very narrow – less than

157 Wasserman, A. (2010), pp. 279-284.