One ballad, six decades, six very different versions
Sizwe plays a famous ballad plainly on the piano, then follows it through six recordings from the 1940s to today, explaining what each musician changed and why it still works.
A South African standard the world never learned
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Show notes
The tune everybody here knows
Every musician in Johannesburg can play this tune and almost nobody outside the country has heard it. Sizwe plays it on the piano, tells the story of where it came from and follows it through exile-era recordings to a version made last year.
- The melody, played plainly, and the township it came from
- The first recording and the band that made it
- Exile recordings from London and New York in the 1970s
- Why the tune survived when the bands did not
- Piano demonstration: the bass line that makes it South African
The recordings are listed in the notes, including the new version.
Transcript
Welcome to Blue Hour Standards, I am Sizwe Ndlovu, and tonight the standard is one of ours. Every musician in Johannesburg can play this tune. If you call it at a jam session here, nobody asks for a chart. And yet almost nobody outside South Africa has ever heard it, which I think is a shame we can fix in 40 minutes. I will play you the melody first, slowly as always, and tell you about the township it came from. Then we follow it to London and New York, where musicians in exile recorded it in the 1970s as a way of going home, and finally to a version made last year by a band young enough to be my students. At the end, the bass line that makes it ours. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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