Looking to the USA: the politics of male close-harmony song style in South Africa during the 1940s and 1950s

Abstract

In South Africa of the 1950s, night-clubs frequented by blacks were dangerous places. Fights, shootings and stabbings were commonplace, and some shows even ended in riots. Gangsters were an important catalyst for such events: they terrorised musicians and patrons alike. Miriam Makeba, whose singing career began in the 1950s, remembers what it was like:[T]hese men come in, sit in front, and pull out their bottles. They put these before them on the table. Then they take out their guns and put these in front of them on the table, too. We are all supposed to look, and we can't help ourselves: We do. They are like actors, these gangsters, although they do not play. In South Africa, movies are taken very seriously, and there is a movie in the cinemas now in which Richard Widmark plays a hoodlum. They call him Styles, and he dresses up in a hat, a belted jacket, and those Florsheim shoes. The black gangsters go out and dress just like him. In the movie, Richard Widmark eats an apple after each of his crimes. So, all the African hoodlums have gone and gotten apples, too. I see them right there on the tables between the bottles and the guns. (Makeba 1988, p. 49)