581. Music

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

Music travels freely back and forth along the routes that people travel, with no regard for borders or checkpoints or passports. Like voices raised in full-throated ease, music sails through the air on currents of joy, making itself at home wherever it is welcomed in, continually morphing into new forms expressing new settings and circumstances.

I have written a personal piece on this subject before (TMA #18, Songlines) but today, I will just share some of the traveling songs and musical forms that have flowed into and through my life and the lives of so many others and that have woven into their harmonies the joys and sorrows that are common to us all.

Consider the following: reggae, ska, and Two Tone, raga rock, Appalachian music, jazz, blues, and bluegrass, Cape Breton fiddle, Cajun and Zydeco, Hindi film songs in Greece, Afro-Cuban music, country rock and Mexican borderlands. All forms of music that keep on traveling.

Ravi Shankar

Everyone knows that George Harrison of the Beatles became fascinated by the sitar and Indian classical music and traveled to India to study with virtuoso sitar player Ravi Shankar for a time. Besides George, Ravi Shankar famously collaborated with musicians from around the world, including Yehudi Menuhin, Jean-Pierre Rampal, John Coltrane, and Andre Previn, and, incidentally, was the only artist who performed at all three of the famous rock festivals in the United States—Monterey Pop (1967), Woodstock (1969), and the Concert for Bangladesh (1971).

The first Beatles song that featured the sitar was Norwegian Wood, on the Rubber Soul album (1965). Here’s Within You Without You, on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). After Norwegian Wood there was no turning back, and many rock musicians came under the influence of Indian music. As I noted earlier, musical influences are not just one-way streets. British and U.S. musicians were not the only exponents of raga rock. Sitar Man was a song that was popular in the late 1960s when I was a teenager in India, sung by an Indian rock band whose name I cannot remember. I just found it on YouTube!

       Nargis (1929-1981)

Indian films and film songs have also been wildly popular around the world. When my family lived in Greece in the early 1960s, people would come up to us in the street and ask if we knew the film star Nargis. My dad moonlit translating Hindi films into English so that they could then be translated into Greek subtitles. Dozens of Greek songs were directly  borrowed from Hindi ones, and Greeks felt an affinity between the Indian sound and their own Byzantine tradition.
Listen to  this Hindi original and the Greek song it inspired–my dad’s favorite.

In the 1980s Andrew and I loved British Two Tone music—The Specials, Selecter, The Beat, Madness. This music was a fusion of rock and the Jamaican ska which had traveled to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948 with West Indian immigrants. Here’s A Message to You Rudy by The Specials and Missing Words by Selecter. Reggae, which evolved out of jazz and rhythm and blues from the U.S. and ska and rocksteady from Jamaica, traveled to the U.K., the U.S., around the world, and back to Africa with songs like Zimbabwe (1979). Here’s Bob Marley and the Wailers singing the 1977 anthem, Exodus (Movement of the People).

Born in Southern Arizona, Linda Ronstadt was the most famous female rock singer in the 1970s and 1980s, instrumental in the formation of the folk rock and country rock genres. Here’s her 1974 rendition of When Will I Be Loved, first sung by The Everly Brothers. Later in her career she began to celebrate her Mexican roots in albums like Canciones de Mi Padre. Most recently, she has published a memoir, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, which she talks about in this interview, and released a companion album. In the memoir, she describes the eclectic musical environment in her home, and the free movement of people and culture back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border.

There is so much more in the United States alone. New Orleans is famous for its Cajun music, which was brought down by French-speaking Acadians from Canada. Zydeco, also a form from Louisiana, was created by African Americans of Creole heritage.

Willie Dixon (photo: Gilles Petard/Getty )

The African American roots of U.S. Country and Bluegrass have only quite recently begun to be celebrated. Gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and soul were of course Black American musical forms, many of which fed into  rock-n-roll, which drew upon gospel, blues, R&B, country, folk and bluegrass. Here’s Chuck Berry in 1957, with Johnny B. Goode, and 1959, with Back in the USA. In the 1950s many of these musical genres were popularized and marketed in the 1950s by white musicians for white audiences. The blues revival in England and throughout Europe in the 1960s strongly influenced a whole generation of British musicians. Here’s Spoonful by Willie Dixon, who wrote the song in 1960 (though it was Howlin Wolf who first recorded it), and here’s the band Cream’s version (1966). In 1968, when I entered my first high school in England, newly arrived from India, a group of boys surrounded me and asked me to say something in Hindi (they probably said, “Indian”). When I asked them what they wanted me to say, they replied, “spoonful.” I didn’t know the song then, but that must have been what they were thinking of.

Centuries-old folk ballads from the British Isles took on a stark simplicity in early 20th-century Appalachian music in the United States. In the mid-20th century bluegrass and folk revival a whole new generation of musicians began to perform these songs from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. An example is Shady Grove, sung here by Jean Ritchie,  here by Doc Watson, and here combined with the British ballad Matty Groves by Fairport Convention.

The brilliant guitarist Carlos Santana, whose combined rock and Afro-Latin music in massively popular songs like Oye Cómo Va on his album Abraxas (1970) was in turn influenced by musicians like Tito Puente, who combined mambo, jazz, and Afro-Cuban musical styles. Here’s Puente’s 1962 cha-cha-cha original of Oye Cómo Va.

                     Miriam Makeba

Who can forget the many African musicians whose music has traveled the world since the 1960s, among them Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masakela, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ali Farka Touré. Here’s Miriam Makeba singing Malaika with Harry Belafonte. In 1939, South African singer and songwriter Solomon Linda wrote and recorded Mbube (EEM-boo-beh—“lion” in Zulu). In the 1940s folk-music historian Alan Lomax introduced it to Pete Seeger, who sang it with the Weavers as Wimoweh. Subsequently dozens of musicians covered it, and in 1961, with added English lyrics, it became The Lion Sleeps Tonight, made even more famous in The Lion King. But Solomon Linda received no credit in his lifetime.

Superstar Indian playback singer Asha Bhosle (sister of the late Lata Mangeshkar) has collaborated with many other musicians in India and  around the world and three generations have grown up listening to her. Here are the pop hit tribute Brimful  of Asha (1997) by the British Asian band Cornershop and Chura Liya Hai Tum Ne, an R.D. Burman song  from her 2005 collaboration with Kronos Quartet.

                     Salil Chaudhury

I’ll close out with Dhitang Dhitang Bole, a popular film song written by Bengali music director, composer, and prolific songwriter Salil Chaudhury, which my parents used to sing while we lived in Greece. (Here’s a dance performance to the song, by Bengalis in Toronto, Canada.) Chaudhury, who grew up listening to his father’s European classical records, wrote songs for the peasant movement in the 1940s, and composed music for more than 150 films in 13 Indian languages. His songs blended all his musical influences and combined folk melodies or traditional ragas with European-style orchestration. He once said, “I want to create a style which shall transcend borders – a genre which is emphatic and polished, but never predictable.”

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