Reading Section ACT Practice: Humanities- 2 | Reading for ACT PDF Download

Passage 

From Louisiana to the Midwest and everywhere in between, there’s perhaps no musical genre more quintessentially American than the blues. Like barbecue and blue jeans, the blues has acquired an iconic status in American popular culture, and bearing the names of the regions in which they flourished, the branches of blues music exist in as many permutations. But from the delta blues, to the Chicago blues, to the more recent Texas blues, American blues music demonstrates a remarkable conservation of structure and motif across all its divergent incarnations. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find the influence of the blues not only interwoven throughout the whole evolution of rock ‘n roll, but still firmly embedded in popular music today. However, for all its intimate history with American culture, it is important to realize that a stunning majority of what makes the blues “bluesy” originated not in Texas, Chicago or even on the Mississippi delta, but arrived in America with the slaves captured from West Africa 

Unlike its close relative, jazz, which has undergone unprecedented structural reinvention and heterogenesis in its lifetime, blues music has managed in spite of its similarly considerable longevity to retain several pervasive musical hallmarks. This, perhaps more than anything else, divides jazz and blues on the issue of ancestry. For while artistic mutation has obscured the early history of jazz, and caused the list of its suggested precursors to include not only African American spirituals but also Spanish flamenco and Provencal folk music, the comparatively wellpreserved precepts of blues music are unequivocal evidence of a West African origin. 

Among the most significant offspring of these musical forerunners are the distinctive scales used in blues. A blues scale—like many folk music scales— follows a pentatonic progression, but includes several unique, flattened notes; specifically the third, fifth and seventh. The inclusion of these flattened notes in the scale is, in itself, so iconic and exemplary of blues music that they are often referred to as “the blue notes”. In effect, the blue notes impart a minor key tonality to a major key tune. In the Western musical tradition, such an arrangement is described as “dissonance”, and seldom appears in European folk music. However, blue notes were and continue to be used extensively in traditional singing throughout regions of West and Central Africa, and are particularly prevalent in the Jola tribe’s playing of “Akontings”—a stringed West African folk-instrument which, incidentally, is also thought to be a forebear of the American banjo.

Another remnant of the blues’ African heritage survives in the structure of its vocal and lyrical components. Traditionally, a single verse of blues lyrics consists of one line repeated twice over mutually inverse chord changes, followed by a third, rhyming line that resolves the frame. Although this form cannot be said to have been extracted directly from traditional African music, its lineage is consistently traced back to the “work songs” used by African laborers. According to popular music expert Dr. Reebee Garofalo, these early predecessors to the blues were not so much music for the sake of music as they were a "functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure". The transformation of the amorphous and irregular African work songs into the more tightly regulated blues form we know today is thought, perhaps, to have occurred due to the intermixing of Western folk music with the songs of African American slaves. Indeed, by the first half of the twentieth century the blues had become so fixed in lyrical anatomy that one might recognize the structure of several lines from a Billie Holiday song, “My man don’t love me, treats me awful mean / Oh, he’s the lowest man I’ve ever seen,” as iambic pentameter. 

The incubation of blues music began with the first arrival of West African slaves in America, and through the revolution and the emergence of the United States, to the abolition of slavery and onward, the blues continued to evolve and proliferate, taking on new forms, instrumentations and significance. And although today the blues may seem as American as apple pie, we mustn’t forget the creative debt this most American of musical genres owes to its West African ancestors.

Q1: What likely assumption on the part of his readers is the author attempting to overcome in the passage as a whole?
(a) That blues are not high quality music
(b) That the blues are as American as apple pie
(c) That Blues are purely American in origin
(d) That the blues are a key part of American popular culture

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Q2: In line 74, the word “fixed” most nearly means:
(a) established
(b) repaired
(c) supplied
(d) prearranged

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Q3: Which of the following situations is most similar to the relationship between the “Akotings” mentioned in line 49 and a banjo?
(a) The American-invented telephone that was later adapted to the cellular phone thanks to later American inventors
(b) The German-invented Frankfurter that was later adapted to the Hot Dog by American culture thanks to German immigrants
(c) The German invention of calculus that was simultaneously invented by English mathematicians
(d) The Japanese manufacture of electronic devices that were adapted from American inventions in the post-World War II environment

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Q4: According to the passage, the culture of which of these geographical regions made the most significant contributions to the creation of blues music?
(a)Texas
(b) Chicago
(c) Mississippi Delta
(d) West Africa

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Q5: What is the author’s purpose in mentioning Dr. Reebee Garofalo in line 62?        
(a) To provide the backing of an authority to justify his argument in the fourth paragraph
(b) To appeal to a scholar who has clearly  stated  how he agrees with the  thesis of the passage as a whole
(c) To give the testimony of a person who has had to perform African work songs as a laborer
(d)  To show how a  modern-day musician continues to be  influenced by West-African cultural contributions

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Q6: We can infer from the passage that which of the following would NOT need to be relatively consistent across songs characterized as blues?
(a) Lyrical Structure
(b) Musical scales used
(c) Combination of dissonance in the tonality.
(d) Musical instruments utilized

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Q7: Which of the following would most likely be an example of “music for the sake of music” at the term is used in line 63?
(a) A national anthem
(b) A school fight song
(c) A modern symphony
(d) A love song duet

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Q8: According to the second paragraph (lines 21-33), what is the major difference between jazz and the blues?
(a) The longevity they have had in America
(b) The consistency of their styles over time
(c)  Whether they had any foreign influence
(d) Their popularity in modern-day society

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Q9: The term “iambic pentameter” in lines 77-78 is used by the author to illustrate:
(a) The structure of blues music across history
(b) The incubation of blues music in West Africa
(c) The impact of Western culture on the blues
(d) An example of an amorphous work song

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Q10: Which the following best describes the tone of the passage as a whole?
(a) Reasoned persuasion
(b) Impassioned argument
(c) Scholarly detachment
(d) Impersonal indifference

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