Directions: You have a passage with 10 questions following the passage. Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.

Jazz had its beginnings in song. Its roots lie deep in the tradition of Negro folk singing that once flourished throughout the rural Southland of the United States before the Civil War. The Negro, in those days, owned only a few crude musical instruments which he made for himself from boxes, barrels and brooms. His voice was his principal means of musical expression. Songs of work and play, trouble and hope, rose on rich and rhythmic voices everywhere in the South - from peddlers crying their wares to the countryside, from work gangs on the rail roads, from families gathered at the days’s end to sing away their weariness in their unpainted cottages overlooking the cotton fields, from the wayside churches singing with the sounds of Sabbath praise.
 These were the voices which the early Negro musicians imitated and transferred to their horns when they taught themselves to play the discarded band instruments that come into hands at the close of the Civil War in the eighteen sixties. As played by their proud Negro owners, the instruments became extensions of the human voice - “singing horns” which opened the way to Jazz. For this reason, there has always been a strong, singing quality to Jazz.

Q:

Who sang the folksongs?

• 1
  The early Jazz musicians.
• 2
  The Negro musicians.
• 3
  The religious groups.
• 4
  Voices from everywhere in the South.