“You’ve got urban, rural and township, with all of these specialised, so-called neo-traditional styles.”īut Mbube crossed those borders, in part due to the singers’ undeniable charisma. “The basis was built around these very small numbers because of how diverse the South African market was,” Allingham says. Gallo and his subsequent contemporaries recorded huge volumes of singles, but released each in a print run of just a few hundred copies – a number small enough that if the record were to only sell to Xhosa speakers and not Zulu, for example, or just the Afrikaans audience and not English speakers, the label might still break even. “The amount of material that was recorded was not only incredibly diverse, but it was vast in quantity,” he says. US music historian and archivist Rob Allingham frequently works with Gallo Records. And if the Evening Birds could release a massive hit, Gallo bet that getting more groups into the studio could recreate at least a portion of that success. Gallo Record Company first churned out recordings from the Afrikaans community, but Mbube became proof that there was a large audience for music rooted in African traditions – both within South Africa and beyond. South Africa’s burgeoning recording scene facilitated that rapid connection. It’s that combination that gave Mbube a shot globally. Mbube is sung in Zulu and full of vocal lines meant to evoke the penny whistles rooted deeply in South African street music, yet its compositional structure bears a strong western influence. Though some say the song was improvised, there’s an intricate precision to the harmonies. With a variety of international styles available, mbube was primed to further spread African music around the world.Īfter a brief, swooning introduction, Linda and his bandmates lock into the main groove of Mbube. Gramophones, records, and radio also began shrinking the world by the 1920s naturally, Black artists in the US were also often taking influence from African traditions, and in turn influencing African artists. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Touring acts from the US “minstrel show” movement would occasionally include South Africa in their itinerary, performing to largely segregated white and Black audiences.įrom ‘ uyimbube’ to ‘wimoweh’ … Pete Seeger and the Weavers in 1954. Religious schools that conscripted Black South Africans frequently trained students to sing American spirituals in English. Three decades later the song would become a centrepiece of Disney’s animated classic The Lion King.īefore being known as mbube, the genre was known to some as ingoma mbusuke, or “night music”, a domestic musical style that was heavily affected by colonial influences: missionaries and white singing troupes are credited as the first to introduce four-part vocal harmony on the continent. After spreading deeper into the US, another set of musicians, doo wop group the Tokens, added English lyrics, creating the 1961 US No 1 hit The Lion Sleeps Tonight, although Linda’s name was absent from the credits. In the hands of four white voices from New York City, the looped chorus of “ uyimbube” (“You are a lion” in Zulu) became “wimoweh”, and the title of their cover. In 1951, US folk singer Pete Seeger was handed a copy and decided to record a version with his band, the Weavers. But the song’s long, complicated history was just beginning. In 40s South Africa, Linda became a star.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |