User:TUF-KAT/music history of the United States

Native American music
The earliest inhabitants of the United States were the Native Americans, whose music included a range of instruments, styles and techniques. Membranophones and idiophones were especially common. OTHER GENERAL STATEMENTS

PARAGRAPH ON REGIONS

Some of the earliest written references to Native American music come from the Spanish colonizers of the American Southwest. One account, from the 1530s in an area near Big Spring, Texas, describes an idiophone made from a gourd, while another explorer described the natives of New Mexico's Sacramento Mountains with rattles and a copper bell, while the Zunis of Pecos played drums and a fife-like instrument in a ceremony that accompanied the grinding of maize. Few historical accounts give any description of the actual sound of Native American music in the colonial era, because the explorers of the time had a universally negative reaction to the music, and thus their descriptions are overwhelmingly negative in tone.

"(The sorceror) sang and drummed without mercy,-- sometimes yelling at the top of his throat, then hissing like a serpent, then striking his drum on the ground in a frenzy, then leaping up, raving about the wigwam, and calling on the women and children to join him in singing. Now ensured a hideous din; for every throat was strained to the utmost, and all were beating with sticks or fists on the bark of the hut to increase the noise(.)"