Folk / traditional music in Africa
Music of Africa is the basic of many kind of musics which exist today in the world. Three of big continents, Europe, North America and South America were directly under the influential of African music and traditions. During the dark age of slavery and colonization, many black slaves were taken to South and North America. Almost in all countries of South America these black slaves took their musical instruments and traditions into South America and they kept their music and culture. During the time these traditional African musics, became part of traditional music in their places and also mixed with other regional music and new type of folk musics were born. In North America also African music resulted into Blues and then later, into Jazz.
All these music genres, later came back to Africa in the period of colonization again by Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch,.... So these musics mixed again with the creativity of Africans and leaded to new musical Genres.
The music of North Africa and Muslims had lots of influence over Europa specifically in Spain. It is said that travel of music from North Africa to Spain were caused to creation of guitar and flamenco genre.
Even some parts of Asia were received some African music influential like south of Iran or Arabic areas close to Africa.
Today almost most of the famous and popular music that we hear, has some roots in African music. Jazz, blues, rock, etc have African roots in some way.
In the aspect of traditional music, Africa hosts thousands of rhythms, uncountable types of percussion and drums, many type of musical rituals and traditions, like tradition of griots or healing ceremony of Gnawa. With hosting of many tribes, these musics and genres still exist in many different way.
By checking list below for each African country, you can know more about each folk music genre or instrument in each African country. You can also listen to some traditional songs for different regions of Africa.