Africans in the New World certainly brought their own traditions with them, although they were often prevented from overtly practicing those traditions. But far from being lost, these traditions surfaced nevertheless, often blended with elements acceptable to whites, such as religious ceremonies or seemingly patriotic fife and drum ensembles. Most of those enslaved came originally from West Africa, and there were a number of different tribes in this region. ⁽⁸⁾ However, the music of these different tribes does share some common components. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. describes these components

as the characterizing and foundational elements of African-American music: calls, cries and hollers; call-and-response devices; additive rhythms and polyrhythms; heterophony, pendular thirds, blue notes, bent notes and elisions; hums, moans, grunts, vocables and other rhythmic-oral declamations, interjections and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and parallel intervals and chords; constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures and phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game rivalry; hand-clapping, foot-patting and approximations thereof; apart playing; and the metronomic pulse that underlies all African-American music. ⁽⁹⁾