Hugh Masekela Presents: Songs Of Migration

Last year, Hugh Masekela and the theatre director James Ngcobo staged Songs Of Migration at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, a musical play which ambitiously told the history of the black migrant workers forced to leave their villages to mine in appalling conditions after the discovery of gold in South Africa in 1886. Crowded into urban ghettos, these workers, drawn from different tribes, created new musical styles to form a body of work Masekela calls ‘Africa's greatest literature.’ This album contains the songs adapted by Masekela to create the show's original score, complete with dramatic spoken introductions from the production by Sibongile Khumalo and Masekela himself. ‘Mothers, sons, daughters witnessed the truckloads of men leaving their villages,, he intones in an introduction to a new version of his own classic 1974 song ‘Stimela (Coal Song)’. ‘Side by side, these men stood at the back of the trucks, fighting hard the urge to look back, scared that their loved ones would see the tears in their eyes.’ If the words seem over-sentimental on the page, nothing could be further from the truth in Masekela's passionately moving delivery. He also adapts 19th century folk songs, spirituals, work songs, choral pieces and 1950s township dance hits to create what in effect amounts to an ambitious history of more than a century of South African music. Although recorded in a studio, the production by Masekela and Stewart Levine carefully retains the theatrical feel of a cast recording; while it lacks the flow of a conventional album, the effect is to leave the listener longing to see the work on stage. The production is available for international booking, so let us hope there is a promoter out there bold enough to take it on.