Word: makeba
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...death on Dec. 2 in New York City at 77 from heart failure, coupled with that of South African singer Miriam Makeba three weeks ago, writes finis and fulfillment to 50 years of pursuing self-determination through song, of spreading the word through music. For a handful of black singers, their discography is an aural history, centuries deep, of abduction, enslavement, social and sexual abuse by the whites in power - and of the determination first to outlive the ignominy branded on the race, then to overcome it. In her commanding presence, charismatic delivery and determination to sing black truth...
...voice early on; she was schooled in opera from the age of 13. Appearing in a tour of the musical Finian's Rainbow in her late teens, she started to lend her classical and musical-stage training to the folk repertoire around 1950. Like Harry Belafonte, Leon Bibb and Makeba, Odetta played the swanker nightclubs before the big (mostly white) folk-music surge kicked in later in the decade. Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues, the 1956 Tradition LP with definitively scalding interpretations of "Muleskinner, Easy Rider" and "God's Gonna Cut You Down," announced the arrival of a voice whose...
...United Nations ages ago, before it was even fashionable," said the South African singer Yvonne Chaka Chaka of Miriam Makeba, who died Nov. 10 at 76. The first African woman to win a Grammy, Makeba, known affectionately as "Mama Africa," traveled to New York City in 1963. She appeared before the U.N.'s special committee on apartheid to plead for intervention in South Africa. Her nation repaid Makeba by exiling her until 1990, when President Nelson Mandela personally asked her to return...
Though much of Makeba's influence resulted from her political involvement and her topical lyrics, she shied away from the term political singer. Makeba said in an interview, "I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us--especially the things that hurt...
...Makeba--who often said she would perform until the last day of her life--spent her final moments onstage near Naples, Italy, singing those very words: "Pata Pata is the name of a dance...