Nor must we forget that the music of the American negroes is the music of the English colonists strained through the African temperament; or perhaps we should say the African temperament strained through the music of the English colonists. In any case, Afro-American music is a blend, and the mixing, we may suppose, began with the beginning of slavery in the Southern colonies. The negro slaves were an ignorant, impressionable people set down in the middle of a white civilization from which they naturally and immediately began to absorb the things that were appreciable to their senses. The most easily appreciable, perhaps, of these things was music, and such music as the negroes heard among the white people they absorbed and, to some extent, assimilated.[6] Just how much all this has to do with American music we cannot say, any more than we can say just what is American music. National music, we take it, is the composite musical inheritance of a people, molded and colored by their composite characteristics, inherited and acquired. And the music of the South is undoubtedly part of the musical inheritance of the American people. How much of that inheritance we have rejected and how much retained will not appear until some historian arises with enough scholarship to analyze our musical heritage in detail; with enough genius in research to trace its elements to their sources; and with enough patriotic enthusiasm to lend him patience for the task. In the meantime, surface conditions fail to justify the arbitrary ruling out of the South as an utterly negligible factor in our musical development. III