THERE is something both sad and courageous about Bert’s Buskers, a Johannesburg skiffle band that contains six of the oldest musicians in the country. Sad because, in the case of their eldest member, 81-year-old spoon-player Gunner Burns, time is getting on; courageous because, despite their age — the average is seventysomething — their capacity for enjoyment remains undiminished.
This was clear when the band performed at the launch of the musical We’ll Meet Again at Richard Loring’s Sound Stage in Midrand. The event was a predictable display of World War II nostalgia, and the show itself appears to reduce the horror of war to VE buffet suppers and the singing of sentimental songs. But, undeterred by the tastelessness around them, the Buskers played on, a little less lively than in earlier years, perhaps, but thrumming their way through classics such as Sweet Georgia Brown and The Sunny Side of the Street all the same.
Bert Mirfin, first banjo and founder of the band, has answered so many questions over the years that he delegates press liaison duties to Allan Platt (piano), a mere strippling at 66. “There is this misconception that Bert was in a prisoner-of-war camp, which simply isn’t true,” Platt said. “He did go up north, but he was never in the camps. The important thing is that there was a lot of this type of thing going on during the war, and skiffle is what you could play because you didn’t need the proper instruments.”
Along with skiffle (which has its origins in Australia and is played on improvised instruments such as spoons, washboards and tea-chests), the band plays Ragtime and Dixieland tunes. (In their case, the exotic instruments are supplemented by more conventional ones, such as two banjos, a trumpet and a piano.)
The band only started in the middle of the 1950s (no one seems sure of the exact date). Its raison d’etre, according to Platt, was to raise funds: besides a disability allowance (which not everyone qualified for), the state made no pension provision for war veterans.
Nowadays, the band’s members are pensioners themselves; their earnings supplement their cheques from the state as they carry on “making music, not war”.