Solly keeps his eyes open and transmutes what he sees into songs that he and his homeboys perform a cappella on weekends. In the mid-Thirties they shake off the dust and cow shit and take the train to Johannesburg, city of gold, where they move into the slums and become kitchen boys and factory hands. Among the half-naked herd boys who drift through the mission is a rangy kid called Solomon Linda, born 1909, who gets into the Orpheus-inspired syncopation thing and works bits of it into the Zulu songs he and his friends sing at weddings and feasts. One such place is Gordon Memorial School, perched on the rim of a wild valley called Msinga, which lies in the Zulu heartland, about 300 miles southeast of Johannesburg. Wherever Orpheus goes, “jubilee” music outfits spring up in his wake and spread the glad tidings, which eventually penetrate even the loneliest outposts of civilization. The African brothers have never heard such a thing. McAdoo is a stern old Bible thumper, to be sure, but there’s a subversively rhythmic intensity in his music, a primordial stirring of funk and soul. This American music is a revelation to “civilized natives,” hitherto forced to wear starched collars and sing horrible dirges under the direction of dour white missionaries. Next thing, McAdoo and his troupe are on the road in Africa, playing to slack-jawed crowds in dusty mining towns. They meet during McAdoo’s triumphant tour of Australia in the 1880s, and when Sir Henry becomes High Commissioner of the Cape Colony a few years later, it occurs to him that Orpheus might find it interesting to visit.
Orpheus McAdoo is leader of the celebrated Virginia Jubilee Singers, a combo that specializes in syncopated spirituals. Sir Henry Loch is a rising star of the Colonial Office. This is an African yarn, but it begins with an unlikely friendship between an aristocratic British imperialist and a world-famous American negro. Let’s take it from the top, as they say in the trade.īrian Wilson had to pull off the road when he first heard it, totally overcome Carole King instantly pronounced “a motherfucker.” This one’s for Solomon Linda, then, a Zulu who wrote a melody that earned untold millions for white men but died so poor that his widow couldn’t afford a stone for his grave. It was in the nature of this transaction that black men gave more than they got and often ended up with nothing.
Its epic transcultural saga is also, in a way, the story of popular music, which limped pale-skinned and anemic into the twentieth century but danced out the other side vastly invigorated by transfusions of ragtime and rap, jazz, blues and soul, all of whose bloodlines run back to Africa via slave ships and plantations and ghettos.
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