African folk music is as diverse as the landscape and peoples of that vast continent. However, like it's European cousin with it's triple time rhythms, African folk music also shares some common traits. Firstly, it tends to be circular and repetitive in form, rather than liner and progressive, and usually avoids leading tones. Often it has a "heterophonic" texture - i.e. several different versions of the same melody are sung at the same time. It expresses a communal way of life, and the main singer is the mouthpiece for his people rather than an individual wishing to express a personal identity. Quite often he or she will lead the people in a "call and response" routine.
It was these musical traditions which were transported with the captive people on the slave ships from West Africa into the New World, and which became a familiar sound in the fields and prison camps of the Old South.
In parts of West Africa, most notably in what is today Mali, Senegal and The Gambia, there were ( and still are ) individuals known as the griots, the African equivalent of the travelling minstrel, who moved from village to village telling jokes and stories, playing music, and giving his advice and wisdom. Often he carried a 'banjar', a cruder version of the modern banjo. The griot was regarded as a holy figure because of his special talent to play songs that could make you laugh or cry. During the years of the forced migration of African slaves to America a large number of griots are thought to have been brought over, but instead of singing the old village songs, they sang songs that expressed their fear, sadness and homesickness in this unfamiliar new land. These old songs and field hollers, modified as they passed through generations, became the basis of a new North American black music.
Invevitably contact was made with European music in the form of hymns, folk ballads and military marches for example, introducing new harmonic and rhythmic structures - most notably the strict tempo of march time - and a cross-fertilisation took place which laid the foundations for new hybrids such as spirituals, ragtime and probably the most important single musical style in the development of modern popular music, the blues.

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