Kipsigis and Hugh Tracey

[johncorrigan]

Here's a recent article from the New Yorker. Reasonably well known tale but I enjoyed this paragraph about “Chemirocha III”.

'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.'

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-magnificent-cross-cultural-recordings-of-kenyas-kipsigis-tribe

[Lat-Literal]

Here's a recent article from the New Yorker. Reasonably well known tale but I enjoyed this paragraph about “Chemirocha III”.

'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.'
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cul...kipsigis-tribe

What a wonderful article JC.

So good that an excellent quote from Bob Dylan is read almost as a throwaway line.

I don't think Tracey was imperious any more than someone who collects and classifies butterflies is imperious or indeed another person who works to save endangered species although that is a rather different thing. There may, I suppose, have been in his vision the notion that a certain purity should be preserved but if so that is hardly in line with more obvious and darker colonial notions of racial purity. I see him as essentially a historian who realised that new technology was available to record history in the present day for future generations. And being in that moment, it wasn't ever likely as in the case of prehistoric monuments that improvements in technology would reveal greater truths later on.

Terrorist groups tear up buildings and other aspects of history if they don't conform with their worldview. That is surely more imperious. And then there is the main point of the article - the extraordinary cross-cultural currents which in their context were not inferior or less worthwhile recording. The times were a changing and in being so they too can erase what went before. That is, until they are no longer in memories and hence are in effect history that never took place. Does it matter? Only if the present wants to be real.

What would we think now if there were Kipsigi girls in such a setting and it turned out that a part of their song was by Justin Bieber? There is a hint in the article that this perhaps is the sort of question we could be asking. I should say that it would be tremendous to hear their distinctive voices and to know that singing - especially communal singing - can take place in an impromptu way in 2017. But I would add that there is a difference between the haphazard nature of how the Guy Rodgers' songs had crossed to their predecessors at a time when the impacts of technological changes were beginning to have a global dimension and the imperial nature of modern services from the jet aircraft to the internet.