Artist: Hugh Masekela
Album: I Am Not Afraid (1974)
Song: Stimela/Coal Train
It begins slowly. As in every good train blues, the pistons take a while to pick up speed. In comes that familiar, world-weary, grainy voice, declaiming: “There’s a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi/ there’s a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe/ from Angola and Mozambique/ from Lesotho, from Botswana, from Swaziland …” And at that point the hall usually erupts with such loud recognition and praise that the rap is, for a few seconds, inaudible.
No matter. Anybody who knows South African jazz knows the words to Hugh Masekela’s 1974 Stimela/Coal Train.
Some songs are manufactured in response to commercial prompting. Masekela’s career has had its fair share of those; the man has to eat. But others come from a place so profound that believers call it god. And Stimela was definitely one of those.
It was written in the early Seventies, during one of the troughs in Masekela’s career in the United States. “I felt like a total failure,” he recalled. “I had destroyed my life with drugs and alcohol and could not get a gig or a band together. No recording company was interested in me and I had gone full circle from major success to the point where my life was worse than when I had left South Africa 11 years earlier.”
His friends were so worried about him that when he drifted away from a year-end gathering in Woodstock, where he was co-renting a house, they rushed after him in case something had “gone wrong”.
But the opposite was true. “I ran to the piano and began to sing a song about a train that brought migrant labourers to work in the coal mines of Witbank, my birthplace.” His friends said: “‘That’s a mean song. When did you write it?’ I said, between phrases: ‘I didn’t write it. It’s coming in now.’ The song was Stimela. I sang it from beginning to end as if I had known it for a long time.”
Stimela is a powerful indictment of the migrant labour system with its “stinking, funky, filthy/ Flea-ridden barracks and hostels” where miners “think about the loved ones they may never see again/ Because they might have already been forcibly removed/ From where they last left them/ Or wantonly murdered in the dead of night/ By roving, marauding gangs of no particular origin/ We are told.”
But for Masekela at that time the song was indictment — and more. The coal train was the vehicle of his reconnection with Africa. Shortly after he composed it, he headed to Ghana, hooked up with Hedzoleh Sounds and was soon back in the US charts. “For me,” he said, “songs come like a tidal wave … At this low point, for some reason, the tidal wave that whooshed in on me came all the way from the other side of the Atlantic — from Africa, from home.”
The Africanness of the song he created is most apparent on its first recorded outing. That rap we all know came later. On the album, I Am Not Afraid, there are no English lyrics and no horn solos. The spare introductory notes come from the guitar of Hedzoleh’s Nii Botchwey. Masekela’s vocals urge call and response from his band, over an intricately woven kente of percussion from Kwaku Morton, Isaac Asante, Samuel Nortey and others. Joe Sample’s percussive piano underlines the song’s character as a train blues, building in speed and intensity and then fading into the distance as the train draws away.
The quality of Masekela’s singing has been debated. But as Amiri Baraka argued in Blues People “reference determines value”. Writing of Charlie Parker, Baraka noted: “[His sound] was called by some ‘raucous and uncultivated’. But Parker’s sound was meant to be both those …[He] would literally imitate the human voice with his cries, swoops, squawks and slurs … Parker did not admit that there was any separation between himself and the instrument he had chosen as his means of self-expression.”
That’s the kind of singer Masekela is: you can hear his trumpet in his voice and his voice in his solos.
Stimela has become a classic because, like the best struggle songs it is rooted in reality. Masekela was able to draw deeply and creatively on his own (partly self-inflicted) desolation as a migrant in Seventies America, to transcend individualism and make vivid the pain of apartheid. Later versions may be more ornamented, but listen to that 1974 version and you’ll hear it all.
Hugh Masekela performs at the Teatro at Montecasino on Friday and Saturday at 8pm. Listen to Stimela/Coal Train and suggest your own great South African song at www.mg.co.za/greatsasongs