|
|
|
 |
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Friday, August 04, 2006
MBUBE
Miriam Makeba
Miriam Makeba
RCA : 1960
Available on: Africa
Novus : 1991
[Buy It]
MBUBE
Solomon Linda's Original Evening Birds
Gallotone : 1939
Available on: Mbube Roots: Zulu Choral Music from South Africa, 1930's-1960's
Rounder : 1990
[Buy It]
MBUBE [ALTERNATE TAKE]
Solomon Linda's Original Evening Birds
Gallotone : 1939
Available on: Secret Museum of Mankind : Ethnic Music Classics 1925-1948 vol. 4
Yazoo : 1997
[Buy It]
I've been listening to "Mbube" - the Miriam Makeba version you'll find above - for something like four months now - sometimes once every few days; sometimes many times in a row. The first time around, it hooked me at 1:14, when Makeba starts swimming against the current, and floored me at 1:36, where Makeba sings something which, I don't know how to describe it. You people should send us money for it, and we'll make sure to forward it to Makeba.
Which is pretty much happened with Solomon Linda's original, recorded almost seventy years ago, for the princely sum of 10 shillings. It, too, is amazing, and so's the backstory, sorted out a few years ago by intrepid Afrikaner Rian Malen - it's a tale worth telling, and can read it yourself, as a pdf, here. FYI: It's a long article, so here's 1% of it, as summarized by Microsoft Word:Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds cut several songs under Motsieloa's direction, but the one we're interested in was called "Mbube", Zulu for "the lion", recorded at their second session, in 1939/"Can an all-white group sing songs from Negro culture?"/The answer, of course, lay in the song that Seeger called "Wimoweh"/ Solomon Linda didn't even get a contract/As the song found its fans, money started rolling in/Solomon Linda was entitled to nothing. That's a bit unkind to Seeger, who does seem to have sent Linda a thousand dollar thank you note for the song, which he recorded as one of the Weavers, singing the Zulu uyimbube ("you're a lion") phonetically, as "Wimoweh". No, the real villain here was Paul Campbell, aka Howie Richmond, who copyrighted the song under an alias, as was common practice back in the day. (Malan informs us that, at around the same time, Tin Pan Alley publishers managed to copyright "Greensleeves," "John Henry," "Michael, Roy Your Boat Ashore," "The Battle Hymn of The Republic," and India's national anthem.) Really, it's a good article - you should send us money for it; we'll make sure it gets to Malan.
The song's been covered (in ascending evolutionary order) by Barry Manilow, R.E.M., Jimmy Cliff, and this talking donkey. The best-known version was released in 1961, by a Brooklyn doo-wop group called The Tokens, who turned one of Linda's improvised phrases (which you'll hear at the end of the first Linda recording, above, but not in the unreleased third take, posted below it) into the main theme. We're not posting the Tokens version, or ones by the Weavers or the Kingston Trio, because (a) they're easy to find and (b) anodyne. Instead, here's Alex Chilton's cover, recorded in the course of a long radio interview Chilton gave in support of Like Flies on Sherbert (an album you can read more about here) - and introduced as "one by the token blacks." It's a big-ish file, because I've also included Chilton's performances of two songs from Flies: Roy Orbison's "I've Had It", and the Carter Family's "No More The Moon Shines on Lorena," along with studio chatter involving Christmas trees and Brian Eno:
WIMOWEH
Alex Chilton & Friends
Unreleased Radio Performance
Austin, Tx : 1978
[Send us money; we'll make sure it gets to Chilton]
Stay tuned for more township music - and more Miriam Makeba - in weeks to come. And send money. We promise not to mention The Lion King.Labels: african, alex
posted by Alex
LINK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
