Music making by people of African descent became a subject of interest beginning with descriptions of the Middle Passage, where music making during the process of “dancing the slaves,
” the method employed to exercise slave cargo, documented the transfer of African instruments and musical practices to the New World (Epstein 1977:8–17). By the third decade of the seventeenth century, accounts of New World music making by African slaves as observed by slaveholders, travelers, and missionaries began...
