Focus: Music of South Africa

Carol A. Muller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135901820
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Focus: Music of South Africa provides an in-depth look at the full spectrum of South African music, a musical culture that epitomizes the enormous ethnic, religious, linguistic, class, and gender diversity of the nation itself. Drawing on extensive field and archival research, as well as her own personal experiences, noted ethnomusicologist and South African native Carol A. Muller looks at how South Africans have used music to express a sense of place in South Africa, on the African continent, and around the world.

Part One, Creating Connections, provides introductory materials for the study of South African Music. Part Two, Musical Migrations, moves to a more focused overview of significant musical styles in twentieth-century South Africa -- particularly those known through world circuits. Part Three, Focusing In, takes the reader into the heart of two musical cultures with case studies on South African jazz and the music of the Zulu-language followers of Isaiah Shembe. The accompanying downloadable resources offer vivid examples of traditional, popular, and classical South African musical styles.

PART I Creating Connections

DOI: 10.4324/9780203930632-1

Introduction to Part I

Part I provides a wide-angle view on twentieth-century South Africa: its history, politics, and media, and the ways in which they have shaped and been shaped by two specific music recordings: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (its first iteration recorded in 1939) and the Graceland album (1986). It begins in Chapter 1 with a discussion of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a song that is widely known in many languages around the world, but which, until recently, was rarely recognized as a song coming from South Africa. We briefly address the “South African” musical elements of the original tune, “Mbube,” and move into a more general discussion of South African music in relationship to the Southern African region (South Africa and the countries on her borders); of South Africa’s relationship to the African continent as a whole, and then to the world at large. Chapter 2 outlines South Africa’s political history, focused on the twentieth century: beginning with the era of racial segregation (in the early twentieth century) through the apartheid era (1948-1990), and into the post-apartheid era (1994 to the present). The years 1990-1994 are generally termed the “transitional period” from apartheid to Black majority rule. In Chapter 3 we take a quick look at South Africa’s media history, with a particular focus on radio as the most widespread broadcast medium. And finally, in Chapter 4, we examine Graceland (1986) in some detail. This was a collaborative, and at the time, extremely controversial recording with American popular musician Paul Simon and South Africans including Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ray Phiri, and extending out to Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela. Musical examples of all this music are readily downloadable from iTunes, and other commercial archives of world music, and YouTube has numerous clips of performances by these musicians, some remarkably old and rare, others more recent.

CHAPTER 1 South African Music

DOI: 10.4324/9780203930632-2

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

“African music was, and remains, a music of encounters:’ Manu Dibango (cited in Stewart 1993)

Introduction

“In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.” You probably recognize the words and are already humming the melody quietly to yourself as you visualize the jungle and the lion, but you may not know the real story behind the song. That story is a long and complicated one. ..¹

In short, it begins with the boyhood experiences of Solomon Linda, a Zulu-speaking South African, who inscribed his memory of lion chasing in a song titled “Mbube”² (which means “lion” in the Zulu language).³ In 1939, he recorded the song in Johannesburg, South Africa, with his group of male close-harmony singers, the Solomon Linda Evening Birds. To the surprise of the record company, Gallo, the song sold over 100,000 copies in the 1940s in Southern Africa. Recordings of “Mbube” were then sent to Decca Records in the United States. It was probably Hugh Tracey, African music collector and radio broadcaster, who mailed the records. Tracey began recording the music of Africa with financing from recording entrepreneur Eric Gallo, and broadcasting the music for the South African Broadcast Corporation (SABC) in the late 1930s (see further discussion of Tracey below). Decca Records wasn’t interested, but folksong collector Alan Lomax, who was working for Decca at the time, passed it on with a box of other discarded records to Pete Seeger of the folk group The Weavers. In 1952, The Weavers, who had heard the word “mbube” as “wimoweh,” arranged and recorded the song with its new name, taking it into the American pop charts. Its fame gathered momentum with The Weavers’ 1957 performance in Carnegie Hall in New York City.⁴ The Kingston Trio, who covered “Wimoweh” in 1959, attributed the songwriting credits to “Campbell-Linda” (”Paul Campbell” was the pseudonym The Weavers used as a shorthand so the group could be paid royalties without naming each person individually on the recording). Songwriter George Weiss then wrote new words for the song. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” made the Billboard Top 100 when The Tokens sang the song in 1961. Over the next five decades the “Mbube”/"Wimoweh"/” The Lion Sleeps Tonight” song would undergo hundreds of covers, copies, and arrangements, and be used in the film scores of numerous movies, including most recently Disney’s Lion King (1994 for the film, 1997 for the staged musical). Despite its repeated successes, however, almost no money was channeled back to Solomon Linda or his family for their father’s songwriting contribution to the financial success of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Part of this was because Black South Africans had no legal rights in the late 1930s, and while he was alive Solomon Linda, unaware of what royalties were, repeatedly gave up his rights to ownership.

In a remarkable turn of events, in February 2006 the heirs of Solomon Linda concluded a legal settlement with American songwriter George Weiss’s Abilene Music Company in which the company agreed to pay the family for Linda’s part in the creation of the original song “Mbube.” It was Weiss, ironically the President of the Songwriters Guild (USA) for many years, who had written the new words to Linda’s original tune in the 1960s for The Tokens.⁵ They turned “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and Linda’s melody into a worldwide hit. The South African lawyer had found a loophole in British law that enabled them to pursue the legal battle. Yet, despite it being one of the most popular and recorded songs of the twentieth century, a song that has earned more money for those claiming to have written it than almost any other in recorded history—one writer estimated that it had generated $15 million from the Lion King alone—Linda died a pauper in South Africa in the early 1960s. Forty years later his daughter died in poverty of HIV/AIDS, unable to afford the antiretroviral drugs that could have prolonged her life.

Dense in legal and emotional issues, copyright matters, local-global themes, even a rags to riches narrative that I will not address in any further detail here, the “Lion Sleeps Tonight” story provides a powerful opening to a book on the last century of South African music. The triumphant end to the legal battles on behalf of Solomon Linda, initiated in the 1990s and finally settled in 2006, is quite a different “world music” story from those that ethnomusicologists usually tell—of the failures of globalization, the betrayals from inappropriate use of Third World music in First World studios, and the insatiable thirst for profit of the uncaring entertainment industry. This story speaks to the new-found sense of place and position of South Africa and its music in the early twenty-first century, not only amongst South Africans inside the nation-state, in the region of Southern Africa, or even the African continent, but also in the world at large. The Black South African migrant worker turned recording musician in the 1930s, who posthumously gets his financial due almost seventy years after the fact, parallels the political triumphs of the early 1990s, the place of a now democratic South Africa in the global economy, and the audibility of South African sounds in the world music mix, in a post-Graceland (see Chapter 4), post-apartheid era (see Chapter 2). Several themes emerge in the “Lion Sleeps Tonight” account, which speak of the character of South African music as a category of “world music.” From a traditional song, sung in communal gatherings such as weddings, in a style that was the result of prior forms of musical travel but a language (Zulu) that didn’t travel internationally, “Mbube” had trans-muted into a one-hit wonder in the transnational world of popular music. In so many ways “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is a song that began opening the doors to South African music and musicians abroad in the twentieth century, particularly from 1960. This was the year Miriam Makeba sang it in New York City’s Town Hall, shortly after leaving South Africa for Europe and the United States,⁶ and it is one of the songs she would soon record with Caribbean film star and folksinger Harry Belafonte. American folk/popular singer-songwriter Paul Simon would function in a similar curatorial role for mbube’s (the song and the style’s) historical successor, the isicathamiya genre of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, in the collaborative Graceland project released in 1986 (see Chapter 4 for Graceland discussion, and Chapter 7 for isicathamiya). Miriam Makeba would perform with the Graceland project when it played live on the “African Tour” in Zimbabwe, and later in South Africa.

Though the song was written by one individual and it is his descendants who benefit from the profits earned, “Mbube” has come to symbolize something much larger than itself for South Africans. While it seems to have been the song’s use in Disney’s The Lion King⁷ that rekindled the ownership and royalty payment issues, it was an article in Billboard magazine (2001) written by White South African Rian Malan, and an Emmy award-winning (2006) documentary film made by another White South African, François Verster, on behalf of the South African Broadcast Corporation (SABC), that highlighted the contentious history of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” to a wider South African and international public.⁸ Finally, the copyright lawyer Owen Dean, who took the case on behalf of Solomon Linda, is a White South African, who had the backing of both the South African government and Gallo Records.

As you read the story, you might be wondering why you don’t recognize “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as “African.” There are none of the complex drumming rhythms or drum ensembles accompanying the singing that one might expect of “African” music, and the vocal inflections sound more like church, or doo-wop from the 1950s than you might imagine “African” music to be. Part of the purpose of this book is to interrogate just what we mean when we use the word “African” in a South and Southern African context.⁹ The “Mbube” parts of the “Lion Sleeps Tonight” provide a useful point of entry because, while there are elements of familiarity in the song in the familiar use of African musical traits, like call and response and a cyclical structure, it contains clear evidence of Southern African, and specifically Nguni song style as outlined in the 1970s by ethno-musicologist David Rycroft (in Wachsmann 1971: 213-242). The melody is sung in a call and response format, where the phrases of each section overlap with each other. The song is performed in four-part harmony—with one male soprano, a few altos and tenors, and everyone else on bass; and the chord progression references the marabi¹⁰ harmonic cycle: I-IV-I6/4-V7-I, a cycle that underpins much of South Africa’s most enduring twentieth-century tunes (briefly discussed in Chapter 6). The performance occurs in a cyclical structure, with seemingly infinite cycles of repetition i.e., there is no obvious cadence or point of closure. The melodic phrases are pentatonic; and each melodic line joins the musical fabric in a staggered manner. Dance is an integral dimension of the song’s execution in its original context of performance.

Even if no drums accompany “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” drums are not completely absent from Southern Africa, though they do not form the core of performance. In rural areas, and certain urban performances, one might instead witness a range of instrumental possibilities: xylophones, marimbas, mbiras, whistles, flutes, harps, musical bows, guitar-like instruments, rattles. You may hear the far more pervasive electronic keyboard, drum machine, electric guitar, drum kit, bass guitar, and a wide assortment of brass and woodwind instruments. But mostly in Southern Africa, you will witness the power of the human voice in song, individually, accompanied by a solo instrument, or collectively. Sometimes the voices will sound homophonically—as in the Christian hymn; at others, voices will sound simultaneously but not in unison, each individual articulating his or her own space in a more improvised or polyphonic musical fabric. It is the richness of vocal utterance that has characterized the majority of music made over the last century in South Africa.

Representing South[ern] African Music

“Obviously,” writes Kofi Agawu (2003: 31) “there is a place for studies committed to constructing African music as a unified cultural practice. And equally obviously, there is a place for studies that do not ride roughshod over the particularities of individual expressive forms. Finding imaginative ways of negotiating the continuing dialectic between the particular and the general ranks high among the challenges of representing African music:’ Agawu’s invocation to consider both the particular and the general when we think about the music of Africa is an appropriate point of departure for this book, though I shall expand his binary frame to four levels of analysis: the national (South Africa), the regional (Southern Africa); the continental (Africa as a whole), and then the global, mostly in terms of South Africa’s relationship to those who colonized the continent: Europe, Britain, and culturally, the United States, albeit from a distance.

The shift in viewpoint I am suggesting—of examining South African music as the music of a (unified) nation, inside a region, a continent, and in relationship to the world at large—is not completely new, though what we mean by “African” changes through the twentieth century In the early twentieth century, conceptions of the “African” in “African music” referenced Black Africa in contrast to the “European” from Britain and Europe, and it was defined as such by those born outside the continent, or recently arrived from Europe. In post-apartheid South Africa, “African” is defined as a more unified vision in which all people born on the continent, regardless of racial or ethnic heritage, are identified as “African:’ In contrast, in the mid-twentieth century, it shifted again when musical research became more focused on individual nations, and nations-within-nations-Ndebele, Zulu, Sesotho, and so forth, as part of apartheid ideology in South Africa, and postcolonial recuperation in independent states like Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania.

Before proceeding with the musical issues, here are some basic facts about South Africa, Southern Africa, and the African continent as a whole.

South Africa (since 1994)

• Total population (2003) about 46.5 million people; racial breakdown: about 37 million (79.5 percent) Black, 4 million (8.6 percent) Coloured, 4 million (8.6 percent) White, and just over a million (2.3 percent) classifying themselves as “Indian” (of Indian descent) Eleven official languages since 1996: Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isi-Zulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Siswati, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga. Zulu is the first language of about 24 perc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Creating Connections
• Part II Twentieth-Century Musical Styles: Music in Migration
• Part III Focusing In: Two Case Studies
• Afterword
• Appendices
• Glossary
• References
• Notes
• Index