According to a Willie Ruff web page:

".... The Mitchell-Ruff Duo was officially formed in 1955 when the pianist Dwike Mitchell and the bassist and French horn player Willie Ruff left Lionel Hampton's band to strike out on their own. But its real origins go back even earlier - to 1947, when they were servicemen stationed at Lockbourne Air Force Base, near Columbus, Ohio. Mitchell, a 17-year-old pianist with the unit band, needed a bass player for an Air Force radio show, and he saw a likely candidate in the newly arrived Ruff, who at that time only played the French Horn. ...

... Mitchell is from Florida, Ruff from Alabama ... It was the Mitchell Ruff Duo that introduced jazz to the Soviet Union, in 1959 ... the Mitchell-Ruff Duo that brought jazz to China, in 1981 ... Before the first trip Ruff taught himself Russian, his seventh language, and before the second trip he learned Chinese ...

... Ruff, meanwhile, went to the Yale School of Music, choosing it because he wanted to study with one of its faculty stars, the composer Paul Hindemith. Upon receiving his master's degree in 1954 he tried to get a position with an American symphony orchestra, but found that black musicians were not yet welcome in those ranks. Instead he accepted a job as first French Horn with the Tel Aviv Symphony. Not long before he was to leave he ... saw on his TV screen not only Lionel Hampton's band but ... Mitchell at the piano. Ruff ...[[was]... invited to join Hampton's band ...[and]... and never did get to Israel. ...".


According to a Willie Ruff web page:

"... Line singing in its traditional mode depended on a designated leader ... to speak or intone the first lines of a Psalm, pulling the whole church into a spirited unison response ...

... even today, descendants of African slaves in America and in the West Indies, and a Dwindling number of white "Old Regular Baptists" in Kentucky, still cling to the formative elements of the "old Way" of congregational singing.

... On a visit to Alabama I [ Willie Ruff ] noticed for the first time that a small congregation of black Presbyterians ... were thriving across the river from where I grew up. More importantly, they were holding onto the line singing that white Presbyterians in America and the English speaking world abandoned more than a century ago.

... I learned that white Presbyterians in the Highlands of Scotland, in the outer Hebrides sing the metrical Psalms ... translated into their native Gaelic ... Weeks later ... I booked passage to Scotland armed with what I recalled of Dizzy ... Gillespie ...'s stories ...[of]... a North and South Carolina world -- the Cape Fear region -- in which slave masters and the slaves ... spoke and worshipped in the Gaelic language. ... and a broad collection of recordings of various black congregations in Alabama and North Carolina ...

... I felt as if I were headed for the jam session of my life, for a singing leader in North Uist and I were set to spend some concentrated time in a comparative line singing analysis. It didn't take long to ferret out similarities and differences ... between the Gaelic and African blackened musics. ...".

According to a 16 February 2005 Newhouse News Service by Chuck McCutcheon:

"... Historians have noted the lining-out practice continues not just in the American South and Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland, but in the English-speaking West Indian countries such as Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. London's sizable West Indian population also still uses it. ...

... "It's very hard to learn," ... Jazz artist Willie Ruff, a Yale University music professor, ... said. "There's no way to do it except through repetition, and kids today are not going to do that." ...

... Ruff ... is convinced that "presenting the line" -- the unaccompanied singing of psalms in Gaelic by Presbyterians of the Scottish Hebrides -- is the direct ancestor of "lining out," a hymnal singing style of 19th century slaves still practiced at a dwindling number of black Southern churches. Ruff -- a reknowned bassist and French horn player who played with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington -- believes "lining out" evolved into the call-and-response of spirituals and gospel music that, in turn, influenced other American musical styles. In traditional line singing, a designated person sings a line solo from the biblical Book of Psalms, inviting congregation members to follow in their own time and with their own harmonies.The result is an echoing, surging and radiant chorus that critic Jo Morrison, writing in the arts magazine Rambles, compared to "waves of music crashing against the walls of the church, washing the entire congregation in a sea of sound." I can think of no musical tradition that can lend itself to be `blackened' by these Africans as this," said Ruff, who is black. "The basic stuff that would later be spirituals, blues, ragtime, jazz, bebop -- everything else that came later has some of this genetic DNA." ...

... As many as 50,000 Gaelic immigrants from Scotland settled in the 18th and 19th centuries in North Carolina's Cape Fear region and other parts of the South. When they worshipped, their slaves sat in the balcony while they sang below. ...".

 


Since there were a lot more Scottish indentured servants than Scottish masters and overseers, and since the African slaves and Scottish indentured servants were socially pretty much on the same level, it seems to me that a lot of the Scottish line singing influence may have come from same-level social contact rather than master-slave social contact.

I am living proof of such same-level social contact, since my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was an African slave and my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was a Scottish indentured servant.

 

 


 

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