Review - Zulu Guitar Blues

A review of the recent release of Zulu Guitar Blues: Cowboys, Troubadours and Jilted Lovers 1950-1965.

Botswanan guitarists were a large part of the reason I started Music of Africa and we've featured a bunch of guitar music since then. Including Guitar Music of Western Kenya and Bulawayo Blue Yodel.

Now it's time to take a look at/listen to Zulu Guitar Blues, which focuses on South African music. We have Matsuli Music to thank for it and here's a snip from what they have to say about it:

But for this compilation of rescued songs masterfully restored from rare 78 rpm shellacs, few could imagine the diversely beautiful roots of Zulu Guitar Music emerging during the period 1950 – 1965. Story-tellers and master musicians appropriate outlaw personae, re-purpose country and western, Hawaiian and other styles, to stretch and challenge our notion of “the Zulu guitar”.

Twenty-five songs (18 on vinyl) plunge us into the depths of the migrant experience. Translations in the liner notes offer us glimpses of pugnacity, melancholy and heartache, all coloured by the paternalism that circumscribed the singers’ apartheid-dominated lives.

The early mbaqanga undertow in many of the songs subverts the wanderlust of Country and Western music into a fugitivity burdened by nostalgia. Something irretrievable has been lost, prompting a blending of ideas and cultures to make sense through thankless acts of musical divination. Inadvertently they have been thrust into the role of the antihero, where outwitting competition for lovers is as important as evading the Black Jacks (apartheid’s municipal cops) and their informants.

It's all good here - if you ask me - but a few of the songs stand out from the pack. Topping the list, for me, are Baca Boys, with “Ngiyamqoma” (“I’m Choosing Him”). It's a chipper tune that tells of a woman who falls for a guitar player. Wishful thinking? A scene from real life?

Almon Memela provides more highlights. He opens things and is represented with one other song, a bonus track on the digital edition. Mbaqanga Guitar Trio offer an upbeat number, “Come Again? (What Did You Say?).” It's an instrumental. They're not the only trio represented here. Nongomo Trio's “Guga Mzimba” (“Getting Old”) is a raucous piece that features slide guitar. It would have had me on my feet dancing, if I weren't such a dignified sort. I had to restrain myself again when it came to “Marabi Jazz,” by Mfongozi Guitar Players, another toe-tapper.

And so it goes. I don't rate things I review, but if I did, this would get very high marks.