By 1808 the Atlantic slave trade had brought just about half 1,000,000 Africans to the U. S. The slaves largely came from West Africa and brought robust tribal musical customs with them Handsome holidays featuring African dances to drums were arranged on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843, as were similar gatherings in New England and Long Island. African music was largely functional, for work or ritual, and included work songs and field hollers. The African convention employed a single-line tune and call-and-response pattern, but without the EU idea of harmony.

Rhythms reflected African speech patterns, and the African use of pentatonic scales led straight to blue notes in blues and jazz. In the early 19th century a rising number of black musicians learnt how to play Western european instruments, especially the violin, which they used to parody Western european dance music in their own cakewalk dances. In turn, European-American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized such music globally, mixing syncopation with EU harmonic accompaniment. Louis Moreau Gottschalk changed African-American cakewalk music, South American, Caribbean and other slave tunes as piano salon music. Another influence came from black slaves who had learned the harmonic form of hymns and incorporated it into their own music as spirituals.The origins of the blues are undocumented, though they can be viewed as the temporal opposite number of the spirituals. Paul Oliver has drawn attention to likenesses in instruments, music and social function to the griots of the West African savannah.