The Musically (and Mechanically) Minded Minister and the Guspy Warrior
One of Zimbabwe's best known gospel singers and his musician son.
I tend to equate gospel music with stodgy old hymns delivered by a congregation with a wide range of vocal talent. But when I first made the acquaintance of the music of Zimbabwean gospel singer and minister, Machanic Manyeruke, I was introduced to the novel notion that gospel music could be something one might want to hear.
Manyeruke was given his nickname early on for his facility with mechanical things. The question of how the nickname evolved from Mechanic to Machanic is a mystery, one I was unable to solve. But the "misspelling" seems to be the more common usage.
Grammatical issues aside, Manyeruke is into his seventies now and in addition to his ministerial duties, has recorded about forty albums, many of them with female backing singers, The Puritans. Manyeruke is well-known enough that he's been the subject of a documentary, which we mentioned here.
And the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree, for Manyeruke's youngest child. Musician families are hardly a new thing (Bach's sons, Mozart's father, Frank Sinatra Jr., Wolfgang Van Halen) and here at Music of Africa, we've featured Oliver Mtukudzi (Zimbabwe) many times, as well as his daughter, Selmor. And Joseph Kamaru (Kenya), an ambient musician whose grandfather (also Joseph Kamaru), was a famous musician during his heyday.
Emmanuel Manyeruke is the youngest of the eight Manyeruke siblings and has been making music as Guspy Warrior since 2008, before graduating high school. His YouTube page describes him as "a Dancehall and Reggae Artist from Zimbabwe."
What does the minister/gospel singer father make of "his musician son Guspy Warrior’s seedy Zimdancehall lyrics and genre," as a Zimbabwean news site so charitably put it? It seems he takes a somewhat progressive view of these things.
The same site quoted Machanic, who said in a radio interview, “When kids are growing up, we as parents often ask them what they wished to pursue in their adult life and quite often we advise them on the hazards of their chosen careers...But what we do not do is to impose our own choices over theirs because if that fails, you will ever remain bitter with them."
The father also signaled his approval by collaborating with his son on the song and video at the top of this page. If you scrolled past it, scroll back up and give it a spin.
Just to make a case for gospel—as with jazz, in the 70s, gospel was viewed as music your parents or grandparents listened to. It fell out of favor with the youth. But what was in favor with the youth at the time was funk & soul. Both jazz and gospel embraced these newer music genres to pull in the youth. Throughout the early-mid 1970s, both jazz and gospel became very funky and isn't that stodgy gospel your grandparents listened to.
I am not even religious, but some of the funkiest slabs of 70s gospel get as close as anything to try to convince me the power of "God."
And, of course, a lot of gospel also derives from ancestral African songs.