Country Music In Africa - Jim Reeves

"Jim Reeves was a popular American country music singer who toured and starred in a South African film in the 1960s. He was more popular in South Africa than Elvis Presley at the time."

As their plane landed, Jim and the others were amazed to see thousands of people of all ages and colors lining the tarmac screaming at the top of their lungs to welcome Gentleman Jim. After a short press conference inside the airport, it was all that Jim and the others could do to leave and make it to their hotel.

This was the first time that Jim had been treated as a superstar. When they got to the hotel, people rushed him and for a second the crowd became so excited that Jim and the others actually feared for their lives. After several sellout shows for about 60,000 people, Jim Reeves' legend in South Africa had just begun.

When I started this site a while back, I was unaware of how popular certain American country musicians were in parts of Africa. Until I ran across a Kenyan song called "Chemirocha." A Kenyan song recorded by song collector, Hugh Tracey, in 1950.

The name of which is said to be a variation on the name of Jimmie Rodgers, the American country (proto-country?) singer. Apparently some of Rodgers' records had made their way into East Africa in prior decades and his music was quite popular there.

There are other American country artists who went over well in Africa. But the one we'll focus on today is Jim Reeves, arguably one of the more popular American country artists in Africa. I might not know of Jim Reeves, if it weren't for the fact that my grandfather liked his music. I wasn't much of a fan, but everyone likes what they like.

Reeves might have had a career as a baseball player, but after a few years in the minors, an injury put a halt to that and music became his focus.

Early on, he played a more rough and rowdy style of country music, but as time went on, he started to tone things down. As the Fifties dawned, he became part of that group of country artists who created the so-called Nashville Sound, which was kind of a mashup of country and easy listening.

Reeves' music was quite popular in a number of countries, in some cases perhaps more than in his own country. Billboard magazine once noted that "Reeves’ star shone equally bright overseas in the United Kingdom, India, Germany, and even South Africa" and he was one of the most popular English language singers in Sri Lanka.

Reeves toured South Africa in 1962 and 1963 and was quite a hit. He recorded at least one album in the Afrikaans language - which was not a native language. It's not clear what he and his fellow musicians made of apartheid, although the answer might lie in this scholarly article I didn't access.

Reeves starred in a South African movie called Kimberley Jim. I haven't seen it, but judging from the trailer, it was not all that far removed from some of Elvis Presley's many cinematic works. The movie was released in 1965, after Reeves' death in a plane crash the summer before.

Reeves was so popular in Nigeria that Afropop Worldwide discussed the phenemenon with Uchenna Ikonne in a 2017 article. Who confirmed that Reeves was still popular there and that when he was growing up in the Eighties, "Jim Reeves tapes and records where everywhere, and it seemed as if there were new Jim Reeves records out every month. I had no idea that the man had died in the 1960s, because he seemed to be very much alive. And that's still the case today, and his records are played all the time."

As Ikonne noted:

In some quarters, Western pop music as a whole was called sentimental music. You know, Western pop music at that time, in the pre-rock 'n' roll era, what was considered pop music in the West was very melodic and usually a bit sentimental, which differed from rhythmic music. You'd often hear about the "rhythmic," the "So and So Rhythmic Orchestra," and that was jazz and other musics of that kind. So the very richly melodic music was often called sentimental.

It's Sunday morning music. Everybody has it in their house and they listen to it on Sunday morning, when you're cleaning the house and getting ready to go to church or when you come back from church and are preparing lunch, everyone listens to their Jim Reeves and their Don Williams.