Were there African/black musicians/singers in France
in the 1940s?
shareEuropean Jazz was recent, and directly inspired by American artists, unsurprisingly it influenced "white" musicians(see Gypsy jazz "Jazz manouche") since they were not a lot of black people in metropolitan France.
They were some, but not enough to count as a minority (more like a statistical anomaly), can't say for sure since it's not one of my area of knowledge (not really giving a *beep* about it) but most of the north african/sub-Saharan immigration came after the war, during the 50s because there was a need of a workforce to rebuild the country + demographic boom post ww2, so we needed housing.
Before that there was some colonial troops who stayed after the 1st world war, more after the second.
But no, black people in France, were not common, and would have been extremely hard to find outside Paris and major cities (mostly important coastal city).
Colonial troops and American soldiers were basically the first contact with PoC for a good part of the population, mostly in rural areas.
Again I m no expert, so it's an uneducated portrayal, would be happy to be proven otherwise.
Except for the type of *beep* who are trying to justify things like the presence of a black knight in early medieval period by saying "uh there was a mention in DatObscureDutchArthurianTale so you must be racist to say it's a token black guy.
That type can go impale themselves on pikes ottoman style.
But that's pretty irrelevant in regard of the last episode, since it's a traveling US jazz band, and those bands became popular during the first half of the century in major cities music halls.
Keep in mind I m not a major history buff so take everything here with a grain of salt.
I'm sure that there were a lot that came from the black colonies.......and also they had slaves, too, only they weren't talked about that much...
although I do say that they wouldn't have been in the country side....that much.....but...
susan
Most of them on metropolitan territory (not a lot) were either in Paris or big coastal cities like Bordeaux, you can't dismiss the rest of the country as "country side".
But most of them (a vast majority) came during the second half of the twentieth century, before that there was an influx of people from the colonies through the first world war, and a lot more through the second one.
Our slaves were kept where they worked, in our Caribbean colonies mostly, but also islands, like La Reunion.
France didn't practice slavery a lot in the metropole.
Edit: In 1946, They were 13 517 Sub-Saharan people living in metropolitan France, 17 797 in 1962, 3-5 millions nowadays (around 5% of the total population).
So that gives you an idea on the past and present demography.