Songs That Made the World Turn Round, Part 4.
‘Pata Pata’ is usually discussed from the point of view of its place in the history of (a) South African music or (b) Miriam Makeba’s career. Ace Records has placed it in the context of its producer’s career, by including it in their compilation of hits produced and/or co-written by Jerry Ragovoy. He is the Philadelphia pianist directly associated with Garnet Mimms and Howard Tate (as their producer) but indirectly with Irma Thomas and Janis Joplin, who covered his songs ‘Time is on My Side’, ‘Piece of My Heart’ and ‘Cry Baby’. Interviewed specially for this album, Jerry recalls being invited by Warner Brothers to produce an album by the new South African singer they had just signed, who wanted to sing American ballads. Once Jerry had seen Miriam Makeba do her South African repertoire in a club, he invited her to his office where he asked to sing some of them again, but acapella. Having picked out ‘Pata Pata’ as the best one to do, he quickly devised an arrangement based around a piano riff in the currently popular Latin boogaloo idiom. Bingo! The record not only made the top ten straight away but has endured, becoming as big as any he has been involved in.
Individually, Arnaldo Antunes, Carlinhos Brown and Marisa Monte are three of Brazil’s most interesting and popular singers and song writers of their generation (born in 1960, ’62 and ’67, respectively). When they came together for the album Tribalistas, it spawned several huge hits and became on the best-selling albums of the era. Placed as the final track, the album’s title song was not one of those big hits, but was my favourite from the start, opening with Arnaldo’s deep voice intoning the words from a Portuguese dictionary which precede ‘tribalista’ and then breaking into the rhythm that many of us identify with the recently deceased Bo Diddley.
Even if you were not told that ‘Regresa’ by Lucha Reyes was one of the most popular songs in Peru in the early 1970,s you’d assume it must have been a hit somewhere. It just exudes quiet confidence in its own appeal.
My awareness of music from outside the western mainstream dates from the early 1980s, so I missed the initial impact of ‘Sweet Mother’ by Prince Nico Mbarga, which had swept through Nigeria and its neighbours upon its release in1976. But the song endured, being covered not only by singers from Sierra Leone and Ghana, but even across the Atlantic where a soca version was popular in Trinidad and Miami. The words are innocent and te guitar line is repetitive, but the song’s appeal has never waned.
In his book Princes Among Men, author Garth Cartwright makes clear how unpopular the Serbian composer Goran Bregovic is among the Roma musicians of the Balkans. Partly, there is irritation that Bregovic, in his role as score composer for the films of Emir Kusturica, is far better known outside the region than the bandleaders whose musicians he used. But even greater is the resentment that Bregovic not only registered himself as copyright owner of many traditional tunes arranged for the films, but subsequently claimed royalties on other people’s versions of them. As a listener who had found the authentic versions of many of these songs difficult to cope with, I am grateful to Bregovic for opening my ears and enabling me eventually to come to terms with the real thing. While Roma musicians grumble about Time of the Gypsies, it remains in my memory one of my favourite films of all time, and the spectacular
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