Analecta: “It Ferments and Bubbles Over”

This stomach of mine is all gone soppy, but I’ve no time to set it in the sun:

Note the sun going apace.

Let’s hurry along in hot haste! Come on, let’s step on it, my friend!

A certain responsibility sits untended, awaiting my attention.

Even as I do all this, it ferments and bubbles over:

It’s now (a gourd of palm) wine.

There! I thirst to drink it, my people.

Salia Koroma, Kpumbo (late 1940s, early 1950s Decca recording ).

Who Pays The Accordionist Calls The Tune

For the uninitiated, the Salia Koroma vignettes are, with a few exceptions, mostly culled from longer songs and narratives. In their way they demonstrate that a recording is no different from a live performance. There’s always an audience,  present or imagined (targeted); the artist is always performing, and they adjusts their “acts” accordingly. In this case the “audience” was the recording company, not necessarily the Joe Vamboi who was going to lay out his one- ‘n- six (or whatever the amount) for the record. The circumstance (sitting on a veranda or in a recording studio) will influence the content to varying degrees, as will the person (or entity) hosting the preformance.

They also show that technology places its own demands on the artist. For someone used to long night sessions with his patrons it must have been very demanding to be asked to edit a 30-minute song to  3 minutes or less. But the final products are just delightful, absolutely so. What’s not so delightful about them are the title. Let’s just say they leave a lot to be desired.

The first such vignette by Salliah and his Accordian (sic) that I’m posting (the second, really. Ko Sao was the first)  is entitled Yaumu Sukui. What in the name of God is that? In any case we know what Decca was going for: Yohmie. Compare this short version to the longer one I posted last February. The differences aren’t that great to be highlighted. Unless, of course, I’m in a nitpicking mood, which I’m not. The vocal play is amazing. And the timing! And the enunciation! The lyrical confidence!

Enjoy.

The Year of The Salia Koroma Vignette

Happy 2010, ye Happy Few!

As the heading to this post makes clear, I’ll try to make this year what I’ve chosen to call the “Year of the S.K. Vignette.”  The vignettes I’m referring to are the numerous short recordings Salia did for some international and local Sierra Leonean recording houses from the 1940s to the early 1970s. We shall have time and space to discuss the ‘circumstances’ and contexts of these gems.

May these gems increase your happiness, happy as you already are!

Yohmie, Dohmie, What’s What?

I wrote in my last post that I was going to tackle the word Yohmie, though I question the wisdom of such an enterprise even as I write, as definitions often do raise more questions than they can answer. So rather than aim at giving any narrow definition, I’ll opt for  descriptions. That’s cheating, you’d say; but you’re wrong.

A Yohmie (or Yohmeh, depending on the Mende dialect you speak), as Dr Kenneth Little pointed out in his 1948 article and translation of the song in the anthropological journal Man,  is a ballad. We run into problems (which can’t be discussed here) when he goes on to say that it’s like the European ballad, a composition forming part of the oral tradition and preserved as a musical (or literary) form.

While this may be true of the yohmie in general, it was slightly off the mark in the yohmie that he then went on to give a “free translation.” His view of the ballad as a communal production denies the individual composer’s role even where it’s patently evident. That may explain his ‘refusal’ to identify Salia as the “Mende accordionist in the employ of a Chief  in Middle Mende country.”

So here we are.  A yohmie is a narrative set to a song. It seeks to be lyrical at all times. It differs from the dohmie (or dohmeh, as our koh-Mende cousins would say) in that the latter is a spoken narrative, pure and simple. As exemplified in the Salia Koroma composition, the yohmie is distinguished, firstly, by its dramatic, narrative structure, in which its past-paced nature leaves us filling in the gaps from the vivid flashes of character and place descriptions. Secondly, the Salia Koroma ballad is intensely personal, setting it apart from the ordinary Mende narrative song that tells the story from a third person point of view.

So the ballad as we understand it has nothing to do with the popular notion of  it as a  romantic or sentimental song. Now here’s hoping that I shan’t have to come back to the subject.

“As We Meet Here, There’ll Be No Backbiting”

I’ve decided to put up the rest of the song Yohmie, so I’m posting the second instalment. Other segments will follow. My initial intention was to go no further than the poetic prelude I posted back in February; but try as I could, I couldn’t quite ignore the fact that, as a stand-alone,  it lacked something. This sentiment takes nothing away from the prelude. But the word “yohmie” means a ballad, which  is a sung narrative. (I’ll treat the word “yohmie” (ballad) in a future post in order to clear up any misunderstanding about the popular understanding of the term ballad. This is important, as my explanation will show.)

In  Part Two Salia Koroma narrates his run-in with Sapha, a sneaky Koranic teacher, and how he was finally able to evade Kamoh Sapha and his pupils. The time of the story was when Salia was a young man, or at least a youngish man. Teacher Sapha gives him a shilling, which Salia believes to be a token of appreciation. Little did he know that “the Muslim man” was ‘investing’ in his (Salia’s)  tour. He reluctantly agrees, only to find out that the man had two pupils instead of one, as he’d been told. Well, I don’t want to spoil the plot.  Enjoy!

Yohmie 2 is in the Salia Collection in the sidebar.