![]() The story of artists and songwriters being short-changed by agents, publishers and record companies is a recurring refrain throughout the early history of rock music, as it was for all forms of music in this era. In 1939, Linda and the Evening Birds recorded Mbube, Zulu for “lion.” The song was a big hit in South Africa, though the rights to the song were purchased by his record agency Gallo Record Company for slightly less than $2! Bill DeMain says that as compensation, also gave him a job sweeping floors and serving tea in their packing house. Solomon Linda (on far L) and the Evening Birds And here are the Evening Birds looking very dapper indeed (Linda is on the far left). The Wikipedia article describes them as “ a very cool urban act that wears pinstriped suits, bowler hats and dandy two-tone shoes“. They gained a regional following from their performances at the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg. Linda headed a choir group called the Evening Birds, made up of boyhood friends from his hometown of Pomeroy. Influenced by the new syncopated music that had been introduced into South Africa from the US during the 1880s, he included it in the Zulu songs he and his friends sang at weddings and feasts. ![]() He attended the Gordon Memorial mission school where he learned somewhat about Western musical culture, hymns, and choir contests in which he participated. Was familiar with the traditions of amahubo and izingoma zomtshado (wedding songs) music. Our story begins in South Africa in the 1930s, where Zulu musician Solomon Linda was trying to establish himself in the Ladysmith area of Natal. It also touches on the issue of intellectual property rights – who “owns” the rights to a song, particularly as it crosses from one country to another, or when it can be classified as a folk or traditional song? It provides insight into the way songs are transformed as they move from one culture to another. In fact, it's even more of a hodgepodge than the original version was seven years previously.Hello there! This edition of Tim’s Cover Story tells the fascinating story of a song that originated as a popular tune in South Africa in the 1930s, then morphed into a folk classic in the 50s and finally emerged as a #1 rock song in 1963. Although it contains a couple of Seeger's greatest hits, "Wimoweh" and "If I Had a Hammer (Hammer Song)," as well as some interesting performances of spirituals, with such collaborators as Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Willie Dixon thrown in, the album is still a hodgepodge. ![]() The recordings also seem to have been re-edited and remixed, with some extra waves of applause overdubbed. In 1968, Folkways was in a flurry of releasing Seeger compilations (the others were Pete Seeger Sings Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger Sings Leadbelly, and Where Have All the Flowers Gone?), and this one takes eight of the 12 tracks from the Sing Out with Pete! album, re-sequences them, and adds a few other stray tracks ("Wasn't That a Time," "What a Friend We Have in Congress," and "Hymn to Nations"). Nevertheless, Moses Asch, head of Folkways, couldn't have been very pleased at the development, and when Columbia issued its first Seeger album, a live LP called Story Songs in August 1961, Folkways countered the same month with its own live album, Sing Out with Pete!, which turned out to be a cobbled-together set of tracks that had been left off earlier Seeger live collections. This did not, as it turned out, mean that he actually left Folkways, which retained the right to issue not only previously unreleased recordings dating from before the Columbia deal, but also new recordings if Columbia didn't deem them sufficiently commercial to constitute competition. In 1961, Pete Seeger, long the flagship artist of the tiny independent Folkways Records label, signed to the major label Columbia Records. ![]()
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