“Because of the well-documented suppression of drums in British North America, many people have been tempted to believe that North American music might have sounded something more like Cuban music had the drums not been taken away. In the opinion of the South Carolinian Dizzy Gillespie, who devoted a good chunk of his adult life learning how to play with the polyrhythms of Cuban music, "After the drums had been outlawed and taken away, our ancestors had to devise other means of expressing themselves. So they started, like in the fields, singing and clapping their hands, and they would hit the hoe on the ground at the same time. We became monorhythmic." There is some truth in that. Had the polyrhythmic traditions of the Dahomeyans, Congos, and others from clave Africa been able to merge, U.S. music would sound very different. And the way that musical ideas entering from Cuba took hold so easily in black America (and vice versa) attests to the commonality of the people. But repression alone can't explain it. There's something more basic here: the people who established the basis of the African American style were less polyrhythmic already in the motherland. The music of griot Africa does not rely on the "time line" (or rhythmic key, or clave), which is necessary to organize polyrhythmic music--and which is universal in forest Africa, the home of the Cuban style. Instead, it uses a kind of upbeat bounce that Americans are very familiar with from jazz and blues, which does not appear in Cuban music. It is, to quote Gerhard Kubik, "characterized by the predominance of pentatonic tuning patters, the absence of the concept of asymmetric time-line patterns, a relatively simple motional structure lacking in complex polyrhythm but using subtle off-beat accent, and the declamatory vocal style with wavy intonation, melisma, raspy voices, heterophony, and so on." In other words, exactly what the rural blues is, and exactly what black Cuban music is not. Moreover, once this style was established in the southern United States, it was locked in place through isolation from the motherland. ”