The Magnificent Cross-Cultural Recordings of Kenya’s Kipsigis Tribe - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-magnificent-cross-cultural-recordings-of-kenyas-kipsigis-tribe
In 1950, Hugh Tracey, a British-born ethnomusicologist, travelled to Kapkatet, Kenya, to record the native songs of the Kipsigis, a pastoral tribe based in the western highlands of the Rift Valley. Tracey had been studying African music since 1921,
Tracey believed that the indigenous music of Africa was being slowly eradicated and that this was a grave tragedy, and he was right. But while the impulse toward preservation is laudable—Tracey wanted to protect something he respected, and was acting in service of a population he loved—very few creative expressions, no matter how remote, are ever actually free of foreign winds. “Chemirocha III,” it turns out, is no exception. The more the Kipsigi girls repeat the song’s title—with a deliberate pause between the second and third syllable, as if it were two words, Chimi Rocha, Chimi Rocha, Chimi Rocha—the more it becomes clear that, as Tracey discovered, the Kipsigi girls were in fact singing the name of the American country star Jimmie Rodgers.
At some point between 1927 and 1950, a handful of 78-r.p.m. records containing songs yodelled by Rodgers were brought to East Africa, played on portable turntables, and then left behind by Christian missionaries. Rodgers has long been considered one of the forefathers of commercial country music; at the time of his death, in 1933 (he died young, of tuberculosis), he accounted for nearly ten per cent of RCA Victor’s record sales. Rodgers’s “blue yodels,” in which his voice leaps and undulates wildly—maybe in an approximation of a lonesome train whistle, a sound that Rodgers, who had worked for years as a brakeman on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad, had likely internalized—were hugely popular. Bob Dylan later said that Rodgers’s yodel “defies the rational and conjecturing mind.”
The Chemirocha-as-Jimmie-Rodgers story can seem apocryphal—it is too strange, too funny—but both Tracey and the Kipsigis themselves later corroborated and repeated it. “Chemirocha III” is the sound of Rodgers’s strange, melancholy warble, refracted through the imaginations of giddy Kenyan girls. And it is captivating.
The story of “Chemirocha III” feels like an object lesson in the inadvertent benefits of intercultural melding, and of the slipperiness of “purity” itself—as a musical idea, or otherwise. The fact that a record of mid-century African field recordings made by a British folklorist contains a Kenyan folk song inspired by an early country singer from Meridian, Mississippi, himself supposedly inspirited by Swiss yodellers and Celtic hymns and African-American gandy dancers, themselves the descendants of slaves brought to America from Africa, is dizzying, but it still raises important questions about how culture actually moves.
#musique #domaine_public #ethnomusicologie #échanges_culturels
