By Steven Bell

AMERICAN BLACK gospel music has its roots not in Africa but in the Gaelic psalms of presbyterian Scotland, a Yale professor said during a talk in Dundee yesterday.

Accomplished musician Professor Willie Ruff (72), who played with jazz legends Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, was speaking at the Bonar Hall as part of the Celtic Film and Television Festival.

Professor Ruff’s research has uncovered evidence that gospel music was not brought to America’s deep south by slaves as had previously been assumed.

Instead it suggests it was brought by the Scots who worked as their masters and overseers.

He believes that traditional Hebridean psalm singing, known as “precenting the line,” in which psalms are called out and the congregation sings a response, was the earliest form of congregational singing adopted by Africans in America.

After the talk, he told The Courier, “It was about bringing to this audience an idea that they had not had presented to them before.

“We had musical examples of Hebridean psalm singing and congregational singing from the black American south, and it was clear to everyone that there are relationships there.

“The concept we are putting over is that there is a kind of congregational singing which has died out everywhere else in the world except in the American south, the Appalachians and the Hebrides.”

Professor Ruff found that in parts of North Carolina, where huge numbers of emigrants from the Highlands settled in the 1700s, their black slaves spoke only the Gaelic language.

The music professor will further his research by meeting theologians and historians in Edinburgh.