A Proud Daughter Is Seeing to It That the Beat Goes On

Victoria Howard still remembers her father’s drums towering over her as a little girl.

Every time he went on one of his long trips, she knew he would be back with another one of his “treasures.” It might be a stretched sheepskin drum from Ghana, festooned with seashells. Or a conga drum from Cuba. This is a rada drum from Haiti, he would say, listen to it speak.

She and her little brother would drift off to sleep at night to the muted sound of their father playing the drums, off by himself in his study, in the grand old 1920s Los Angeles house that is still the family home. “We felt the vibrating of the house, the rhythm and the beat,” she recalls. “It was a lullaby. It was peace.”

Her father, Joseph Howard, was an oral surgeon, but his true life’s calling was collecting drums and the syncopated stories they told. To him, they were the legacy of the crossroad of peoples that forged the New World.

“This is the fruit of the cross--the cross of cultures,” her father would say, pointing to the instruments in his drum room--some of which are on display at the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum on Wilshire Boulevard.

There was a personal dimension to his lifelong passion, which he shared with Bootsie, his wife and fellow collector.

Dr. Howard’s father was the son of a Puerto Rican and a New Orleans Creole--a people descended from French colonialists and African slaves. His mother was Venezuelan and his grandmother was from India. So he would take care to show his children the drums of the places--from South India to South America--that were pieces of the full mosaic behind the Howard family’s African American heritage.

“It was a way of instilling pride,” Victoria said.

By the time her father passed away in 1994, her parents had amassed more than 600 percussion instruments. They had a Sioux Indian war drum, a Chippewa medicine drum, a Native American dream dance drum; drums from Thailand, Polynesia and Japan.

For Howard, the sweep of the collection is a metaphor for Los Angeles.

“It is composed of peoples from many different backgrounds, who have contributed to the cross of cultures. So recognize this, celebrate this,” she said. “I’ve lived it so long I don’t even see them as drums. I see them as history, culture, heritage, that evolved together and was shared, contributing to lives in ways people don’t even see,” she said. “The whole world is like this.”

At the opening of the exhibit in May, music lovers from all over Los Angeles sipped rum mojitos. Ry Cooder, the producer of the “Buena Vista Social Club” album of Cuban music, stopped by. Afro-Cuban drummers and dancers performed. The exhibit will be on display through Sept. 26.

Most schoolchildren are never taught about the combustible cultural fusion that ignited the explosion of 20th century American music.

But Howard’s father--who wrote a book, “Drums of the Americas”--made sure Victoria and her brother, Brock, knew:

From the day the Spanish brought the first African slaves to the Americas, drums have beaten a tattoo into the soul of the New World.

Slave traders tried to ban the drums because they warned African villagers to flee imminent capture. Drums were thrown off Colonial plantations by planters who feared their percussive language could orchestrate slave revolts. The dances they inspired were deplored by Roman Catholic priests who found them lascivious and even heretical.

But the rhythms, as unstoppable as a pulse and primal as a heartbeat, endured. After Caribbean Indians were exterminated, their drum patterns lived on in Afro-Caribbean culture. The dances were a form of collective prayer, and the rhythms the bridge to higher spiritual ground.

“In many cultures, the drum was just an extension of the physical rhythm of the people. Every person has an internal rhythm and your body will respond to it,” Howard said. “My father felt that rhythm was the universal language. That the rhythm will permeate your spirit, your soul. It’s a connection of the mind, body and spirit.”

“Have you ever been to a concert where everyone is swaying from side to side? If that’s not an expression of higher consciousness, then I don’t know what is,” she said.

African music moved north with Moorish invaders who occupied Spain for 700 years. It moved across the Americas with African slaves and traveled up the Mississippi River with black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. Along the way, Afro-American rhythms became the driving force behind popular American music. They fused with European music, just as swaying African dances blended with European steps and mutated into a vast array of New World dance.

“Through music,” said Howard, “we can all be related.”

Over the years, rhythmic music has overpowered melodic European traditions and shaped the formidable upstart that became the new face of American music.

“Africa has made tremendous gifts to music, but they were not celebrated as such until recently,” Howard said. “Elvis Presley--how big was he?--and where were his influences musically? Black music.

“But we celebrated Elvis Presley--not the African American contribution to his musical persona,” she said. “My dad used to always say, ‘As the drum beats, it is time to give praise and honor.’ If you’ve adopted part of a culture, don’t just take it, give honor to it.”

When he died, Dr. Howard passed the baton to Victoria, making her the owner of the collection. A computer consultant, she hopes to make the drums a living monument to fundamental underpinnings of American culture that have, for too long, been ignored.

“People think if you’re going to study black culture, you have to be black people. But it’s important for all Americans to understand their culture. If we don’t understand the ethnic contributions of our shared heritage, we have no basis for mutual respect,” Howard said.