This incredible journey began with Amelia Dawley in 1931, a 50 year old woman, singing an African song with a haunting melody. It was the longest African text in the United States at the time. The words contained Mende dialect. Anthropologists went throughout Africa playing the song to many tribes looking for recognition of the melody. Finally they found a small tribe in Sierra-Leon, where a woman, Bendu Jabati, remembered the song that her grandmother had taught her. She had told Bendu that one day an individual would come to the village that would know the songs of their family and they would be her brother and sister. The uniqueness of this situation stems from the fact that it is extremely hard to trace one's lineage if you were brought here as a slave. Very few know which tribe or where in Africa they originated. The only reason that anthropologists were able to trace Mary, Amelia's daughter, to Sierra-Leon was because of the song Amelia taught her. Mary as a child treated it as a game, as a rhyme that she would sing to herself.
This is common in history with children's songs and rhymes and even stories. Ring-around-the-rosy is a famous children's song but its root are more morbid than a simple child's song. It is from medieval times when the black plague was ravaging more of Europe. Another less known piece of music that has a double meaning within it are the Shostakovich piano concerts. Shostakovish wrote them during World War II where his village began learning of the horrors that were occurring to the Jews and to his countrymen. The themes within the music have an almost crazed, forced happiness about them with an underlying sinister bass line. As the music reaches its peak of forced joyfulness and psychotic cheerfulness, there is a climbing bass of impending doom.
Musicians use music to express their pain, their life experiences, and their sorrow. The most memorable pieces that have survived the ages are the ones with the most profound meanings, and most of the time, these meanings are no longer remembered just as Mary did not understand the words she was singing only the significance of the history surrounding it and her ancestors.
2 comments:
I definitely think that music is a huge part of history. In this case, It helped a woman find the village that her family came from. I think it was great that a few anthropologists traveled all around Africa playing a song, and because of that, helped reunite a woman with her village family.
The music today makes me think of how it will be remembered many years from now, if at all. There are so many bands, each producing more and more songs every day, but which ones will stick around in people’s minds? And are there more songs, like the funeral song, that are just temporarily lost in the minds of people?
This film (and my apologies for posting up a comment to your post so long after the initial viewing) was absolutely uplifting in so many ways. I'm completely a convert as far as the power of music goes. As a casual music fan (as opposed too a real enthusiast that lists music as an interest in profiles and such) I never realized that the lifetime of a song and of the culture that it originates from could run so long, and so deep into the earth. It was incredible that the power of music was so plausible, so believable that the three scholars/researchers invested their time, energy, money, and efforts in tracing a single melody to find the possible homeland of a woman living amid us in the United States. It was such a heartwarming scene to see that such a simple thing as a ditty a girl heard and remembered from her childhood brought her family/ancestry back to her. What an excellent documentary.
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