Glynis O’Hara
Tom Hark is one of those South African classic songs that simply won’t lie down and go away. Recorded by Elias and His Zig Zag Jive Flutes in the 1950s, it became a huge hit.
It was played by big bands well into the 1960s; used as a theme song for a British TV series called The Killing Stones; recorded by British jazzman Ted Heath and his orchestra,and re-recorded by The Piranhas in 1982 along with another great South African hit, Zambezi.
Now it’s just been recorded again, this time by Mango Groove on their CD Dance Some More, All The Hits So Far, which features three new tracks. So whoever composed it, should, theoretically, be earning a lot of money. But who actually composed it is in dispute, as the Mail & Guardian has reported before.
It’s registered at the South African Music Rights Organisation to Rupert Bopape, producer for Elias and His Zig Zag Jive Flutes. But that’s disputed by Elias Lerole, who says he wrote it. Joe Mogotsi of the Manhattan Brothers, however, says the song actually comes from one of theirs, Komponeng. And John Leyden, Mango’s band leader, says he swears he’s heard a Haydn string piece that sounds exactly like Tom Hark. ”Our song is a bastardisation of all the versions that have gone before,” he says. ”The Piranhas did a punk, yobbo version and we’ve changed it and added some of our own lyrics.”
The original is an instrumental piece, with a theatrical opening that gave the music of the era the name kwela. The listener hears a group of youngsters playing dice in the streets.
As they see police vans coming, they shout ”Here comes the kwela, kwela!” and run. White teenagers apparently thought they were referring to the music and the name stuck.
”It’s vital the proper composers get what’s due to them,” says Leyden, ”but I like eclecticism, like I love The Tokens’s version of Mbube: The Lion Sleeps Tonight. I’m not interested in a politically correct or authentic version, music’s a constantly changing continuum. For me Tom Hark is one of the six all-time great South African hits, along with Mbube: The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Skokiaan, Zambezi, Pata Pata and Meadowlands.
In the meantime, Tom Hark, which actually was meant to be entitled Tomahawk but the printer got it wrong, is registered to EMI/ Bopape on Mango’s CD, as it is at Samro.