Music fans know that American blues music is rooted in West African rhythms. Less well-known is that old-time music also owes a large debt to Africa. Performers on Saturday at The Floyd Country Store will celebrate and explore that deep musical connection, in a show entitled “From Mali To Appalachia.”
Cheick (sounds like “shake”) Hamala Diabate, a Grammy nominee for his 2007 album “From Mali to America,” was born into a family of griots in Mali, West Africa. A griot (“gree-oh”) is a musician, singer, poet, storyteller, and historian who carries on a tradition passed from “grandfather to father, father to son,” Diabate says.
Among the instruments Diabate plays is the ngoni, an African stringed instrument with a skin head.
“Ngoni is the ancestor of the American banjo. Everything I play on the ngoni I can fit on the banjo,” said Diabate, who lives in Washington, D.C. “I would like everyone to come see the connection.”
Old-time musicians “Fiddlin'” Earl White of Floyd County, Danny Knicely of Loudon County and country store co-owner Dylan Locke, on bass, will join Diabate onstage.
White, who lives in Floyd County’s Indian Valley section, is one of a handful of Black old-time fiddlers. He met Diabate when both were hired to play music for a documentary produced by WNET, the New York public television station. “They had him playing gourd banjo and I was basically playing the fiddle, and the scene was to depict what the slaves did after working out in the fields all day,” White said.
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