They were ashamed of slavery as well as of everything
African.
The folk culture, nevertheless, flourished within the music
produced by the Afro-American community. The spirituals and work
songs were the product of the slave. After Emancipation, work
songs were replaced by the blues. Work songs had been adapted to
the mass labor techniques of slavery, whereas the blues, which is
a solo form, was the creation of a lone individual working as a
sharecropper on his own tenant farm. It continued to express the
earthy folk culture, and it, too, was woven into daily life. It
expressed the daily tribulations, weariness, fears, and loves of the
Afro-American after Emancipation. At the beginning of the
twentieth century , blues along with ragtime, became popular,
although not always respectable. They could be heard most often in
saloons and brothels-- nevertheless, they were beginning to move out
of the Afro-American subculture and into the white society.
W. C. Handy, while by no means the father of the blues, became its
best-known commercial creator. He is still remembered for the
"Memphis Blues" and the "St.
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