Enslaved people found freedom in music because literacy was denied them

Evidence

And that’s because what is original to Black American music is a mode by which singers and musicians could be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible under enslavement: through art, through music. It was music no one “composed” (in part because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of uncertainty, of anguish. Of existential introspection. It was music whose depth could elude its own makers. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1144