{"id":3682,"date":"2018-04-28T01:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-04-28T05:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=3682"},"modified":"2021-10-10T16:12:56","modified_gmt":"2021-10-10T20:12:56","slug":"africa-to-appalachia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/africa-to-appalachia\/","title":{"rendered":"Africa to Appalachia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Africa to Appalachia\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6Vf_VRHJfmo?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I compiled this instrumental either while <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/kijana-muke\/\">traveling through Africa<\/a> or shortly afterwards, using &#8220;Wanjiru Wanjiru&#8221; by the Kenyan guitarist Francis Macharia as the unifying theme. I was struck by how much the guitar on that track felt like the kind of fingerpicking played in the Appalachians, so I combined\u00a0 it with two favorite southern mountain showpieces: &#8220;Buckdancer&#8217;s Choice&#8221; by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/railroad-blues\/\">Sam McGee<\/a> and &#8220;Doc&#8217;s Guitar&#8221; from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/deep-river-blues\/\">Doc Watson<\/a>. (To be strictly accurate, McGee was from central Tennessee, not the mountains, but I didn&#8217;t know that when I named the piece.)<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-3684 size-medium alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/The-Nairobi-Sound.jpg?resize=297%2C300&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"297\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/The-Nairobi-Sound.jpg?resize=297%2C300&amp;ssl=1 297w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/The-Nairobi-Sound.jpg?w=350&amp;ssl=1 350w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 297px) 100vw, 297px\" \/>I&#8217;d heard Macharia&#8217;s song on a wonderful album,\u00a0<em>The Nairobi Sound<\/em>,\u00a0 released by a wonderful record label, Original Music. It was the brainchild of John Storm Roberts, a freelance musicologist and all-around-charming fellow whom I had the pleasure of meeting when<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/John%20Storm%20Roberts.html\"> I interviewed him for the <em>Boston Globe <\/em>in 1989<\/a> &#8212; I was preparing for the Africa trip, and that seemed like a good way to get a bunch of free records and meet someone who could put me in touch with useful people all over the continent.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-3685 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Black-Music-of-2-Worlds.jpg?resize=190%2C300&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"190\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Black-Music-of-2-Worlds.jpg?resize=190%2C300&amp;ssl=1 190w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Black-Music-of-2-Worlds.jpg?w=200&amp;ssl=1 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 190px) 100vw, 190px\" \/>I had also read Roberts&#8217;s <em>Black Music of Two Worlds<\/em>, a wide-ranging and insightful history of the ongoing cross-fertilization between musicians and musical styles in Africa and the Americas. It explained, for example, how Cuban recordings by groups like the Trio Matamoros had influenced Congolese music, and touched on the role of US country music throughout sub-Saharan Africa &#8212; which prepared me for conversations about cowboy singers everywhere from Zimbabwe to Kenya. In fact, it was an offhand comment by Roberts that named my band and CD (both of which I&#8217;ll get to in future posts): he was telling me about the influence of Jimmie Rodgers, saying he&#8217;d collected Rodgers imitations in 24 African languages, and mentioned an early reference in print to &#8220;the streetcorner cowboys of\u00a0 Zanzibar,&#8221; which instantly struck me as a great name for a band. (When I got to Nairobi, after hitching through the forests of Zaire and up through Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, there was still a program on the radio every Sunday of &#8220;old Kikuyu music,&#8221; which consisted largely of Kikuyu yodeling cowboy songs by folks like <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/p9f3XqmX8SI\">Sammy Ngako<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-3687 size-full alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/John-Storm-Roberts.jpg?resize=277%2C273&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"277\" height=\"273\" \/>I think of this piece as kind of a tribute to John, since he was the person who made me aware that any discussion of overlaps and similarities between African and American music has to consider not only the huge influence of African traditions on the music of the Americas, but also the huge influence of Cuban, Argentine, French Caribbean, and US styles on African musicians all over the continent. Even before records became common, minstrel shows and Negro spirituals were imported and adapted into African traditions. (The banjo, for example, is originally a West African instrument, but was introduced to new regions of Africa &#8212; and reintroduced in West Africa &#8212; with minstrelsy.)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">To finish this musicological tribute, I recommend listening to a couple of key examples: &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/zV5QRjmfqcI\">El que siembra su maiz<\/a>&#8221; by the Cuban Trio Matamoros, which is a classic example of Afro-Spanish-Caribbean string band music, and\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/H1v64pfeQMM\">the same song performed by Joseph Kabasele<\/a> &#8220;El Gran Kalle&#8221; and his orchestra L&#8217;African Jazz. (As an added fillip, let&#8217;s note the generic use of &#8220;jazz&#8221; in the names of dance bands all over Africa in the mid-20th century, whether or not they played anything resembling jazz.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I compiled this instrumental either while traveling through Africa or shortly afterwards, using &#8220;Wanjiru Wanjiru&#8221; by the Kenyan guitarist Francis Macharia as the unifying theme. I was struck by how much the guitar on that track felt like the kind of fingerpicking played in the Appalachians, so I combined\u00a0 it with two favorite southern mountain &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/africa-to-appalachia\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Africa to Appalachia<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - 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Perry was a good friend and playing with him reshaped my understanding of the guitar. He was particularly noted for his vibrato, which was incredible -- he had exceptionally strong hands and could hold a full chord and get\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Me-and-Perry-at-Georges-80th-birthday-party-292x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3159,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/im-moving-on\/","url_meta":{"origin":3682,"position":1},"title":"I&#8217;m Moving On (Hank Snow\/Ray Charles)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"October 27, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"In the mid-1980s I was looking for songs in the wide area of overlap between blues and country, and Ray Charles' terrific version of this Hank Snow hit made it an obvious choice. In that period I was touring across country twice a year, with most of the gigs in\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Ray-Charles-Movin-On-300x296.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":225,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/worried-man-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":3682,"position":2},"title":"Worried Man Blues (Woody Guthrie\/Carter Family)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"February 21, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"An early country blues from the Carter Family via Woody Guthrie, with touches of Sam McGee...","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Sara Carter","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Sara-Carter-204x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2101,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/perrys-march\/","url_meta":{"origin":3682,"position":3},"title":"Perry&#8217;s March (Perry Lederman)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"October 15, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I met Perry Lederman for the first time at my brother Dave's house in Oakland. He showed up with two bags of groceries, mentioned that he'd just talked a storekeeper out of them, and hung out for a while talking about this and that. He was a guitarist, seemed to\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/perry_head.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":17,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/masanga\/","url_meta":{"origin":3682,"position":4},"title":"Masanga (Jean-Bosco Mwenda)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 10, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"When I was in high school, I spent hundreds of hours at the public library, which was between the two high schools (Rindge Tech and Cambridge High & Latin), listening to records. 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