Music Of South Africa
The South African music scene includes both popular (jive) and folk forms. Pop styles are based on four major sources, Zulu isicathamiya singing and harmonic mbaqanga.
Christian missions provided the first organized musical training in the country, bringing to light many of the modern country's earliest musicians, including Enoch Sontonga, who wrote the national anthem Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. By the end of the nineteenth century, South African cities like Cape Town were large enough to attract foreign musicians, especially American ragtime players. African American spirituals were popularized in the 1890s by Orpheus McAdoo's Jubilee Singers.
Read more about Music Of South Africa: The 1960s, South African Music Today, Neo-traditional Styles
Famous quotes containing the words music of, music, south and/or africa:
“So gladly, from the songs of modern speech
Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers,
And through the music of the languid hours,
They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.”
—Andrew Lang (1844–1912)
“Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
Yet slower yet, oh faintly gentle springs:
List to the heavy part the music bears,
“Woe weeps out her division when she sings.”
Droop herbs and flowers;
Fall grief in showers;
“Our beauties are not ours”:
Oh, I could still,
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,
Drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature’s pride is, now, a withered daffodil.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“... while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?”
—Countee Cullen (1903–1946)