2014/01/02 by Marc Duby · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Music History and Culture #Diverse Musicological Studies #Archaeology and Rock Art Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/18125980.2014.893101
openalex publication_date 2014/01/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
The year 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the song Daar kom die Alibama, inspired by the 1863 visit of CSS Alabama to Table Bay. In this paper I discuss Robbie Jansen's 2003 version of this song with reference to the original song's iconic status in South African culture, its origin as a product of indigenous knowledge and finally some of the musical elements in the song that act as signifiers of contested identities. Following the work of George Lewis and Naomi Cumming, I argue that Jansen and his musical cohorts use a number of deliberate signifiers in the song as markers of a political and historical reclamation effected by a loose group of musicians associated with so-called ‘Cape Jazz,’ so demarcating the city of Cape Town as the epicentre of a particular sound universe shared by these musicians and underpinned by the rhythmic foundation of an indigenous style called ghoema. I suggest that ghoema's special status in some musical circles as a peculiarly Capetonian approach to rhythm is a pointer to deep and intimate connections between music, place, and identity. I adopt for the purposes of the discussion a multi-disciplinary approach using musicological techniques as well as perspectives from phenomenology, historiography, and theories of embodied cognition.