Ingredients

We were amused by the appeal to comprehensiveness in this ¶ long list by Mark Sanders in his most excellent "African American Folk Roots and Black Poetry."

Material objects included quilts, jewelry, toys, musical instruments, etc.; while cultural practices and linguistic forms included work songs, seculars, field hollers, shouts, spirituals, blues, tall tales, aphorisms, dance songs, children's rhymes, toasts, sermons, gospel music, the blues, jazz, playing the dozens, lies, sounding and signifying, etc.  Arguably the most ubiquitous folk source, music, could include varying mixtures of the following elements: descending pentatonic scale, homophonics (as opposed to heterophonics), blue notes, syncopation (in standard time, accents on 2 and 4 rather than 1 and 3), antiphonal or call-and-response dynamics, and vernacular instrumentation.

Come on in the kitchen.