Zig-Zag and all that jive
QUESTION At the start of the 1958 instrumental hit record Tom Hark by Elias & His Zig-Zag Jive Flutes, the band members are talking in their native language. What language and what are they saying? IN the Fifties, the Alexandra township in the Gauteng province of South Africa was a reservoir of street music, especially groups of young lads playing hi-tempo penny-whistle jive.
Elias and His Zig-Zag Jive Flutes was one such band, formed by brothers Elias and Jack Lerole. They began playing Tom Hark – a play on the word tomahawk – the ‘small axe’ that was used for protection in these tough townships, in 1954.
In 1956, a British producer, looking for a theme to accompany The Killing Stones, a TV series about diamond smuggling in South Africa, selected Tom Hark as its theme tune. In mid-1958, Tom Hark was released as a single and rocketed to No.2 in the British charts. It popularised a style of music dubbed the ‘kwela jive’.
Tom Hark begins with a theatrical sketch featuring a gang of men playing a forbidden dice game at a street corner in a South African township.
At the appearance of the green police van, – one of the boys calls out in clear tsotsitaal (an Afrikaans derived street-slang) ‘Hier kom die kwela-kwela! Stop . . . want hulle gaan ons bo vat!” (Here comes the kwela-kwela! Stop . . . otherwise they’re going to take us away.) – the boys cover over the game and whip out their penny-whistles and begin to play.
‘Kwela’ is the stem of a verb in Isizulu and many other southern African Bantu languages, meaning ‘to climb,’ ‘mount’ or ‘ride.’
Police vans became colloquially known as ‘kwela kwela’ – because the delinquents, when hustled in, had to ‘climb up’ into it.
The tune’s popularity saw the word define the music. Kwela developed from improvisational ‘street music’ to a staple of the local recording industry – the first distinctively South African style to achieve international recognition.
Over the years Tom Hark was covered in various forms, from Mille Small, Jimmy Powell and Ted Heath at one end to Georgie Fame, Bert Kaempfert and Mickey Finn and the Blue Men at the other. In 1980 it was covered by punk band The Piranhas.
Chris Evans used the Piranhas version as background music for his TV show, TFI Friday. Then inexplicably the song was adopted by football clubs during the halftime break. It had come a long way from its township roots.
Jerry Smith, Wolverhampton. QUESTION Other than Muhammad Ali, how many Americans refused the draft to fight in Vietnam? FROM a pool of about 27million eligible men, the draft raised 2,215,000 for military service in Vietnam. This provoked many to claim conscientious objector status or to dodge the draft.
The Selective Service System, the independent government
agency that maintained information on those potentially subject to military conscription, recognised 171,000 conscientious objectors over the period 1965-1970; a further 3,275 soldiers received discharges for conscientious objector status that developed after their induction into the military.
In addition, thousands more avoided the draft by leaving the country or refusing to register. Lawrence M Baskir and William A Strauss in Chance And Circumstance: The Draft, The War, And The Vietnam Generation, state that 210,000 Americans dodged the draft, with 20,000 to 30,000 emigrating to Canada.
Richard Bell, St Albans, Herts. QUESTION Where does the word ‘impeachment’ come from? Who was the first person to be impeached? IMPEACHMENT was originally an English form of judicial parliamentary procedure against a public official, in which the Commons are the prosecutors and the Lords the judges. It originated during The Good Parliament of 1376, in the reign of Edward II, famed for its cronyism.
William Latimer, the King’s Chamberlain; John Neville of Raby, Steward of the Kings Household; Richard Lyons, a prominent banker and Alice Perrers the king’s mistress were accused of corruption and impeached. The king was forced to dismiss Latimer and Neville, imprison Lyons, and to banish Perrers.
Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, was the last man to be successfully impeached in 1746 after he switched sides at the Battle of Culloden in favour of the Stuarts. The following year he became the last man in Britain to be publicly beheaded.
The word itself was originally empeach, a late 14th-century word meaning ‘to impede, hinder or prevent’. It came from the Old French empeechier ‘to hinder, stop, impede; capture, trap, ensnare’ ultimately from the Late Latin impedicare ‘to fetter, catch, entangle’. Graham Moore, Barnsley, West Yorks. QUESTION Is Ken Dodd’s Happiness an old country music song? HAPPINESS was written by Bill Anderson, a US country music star known as ‘Whispering Bill’ for his gentle vocals and habit of narrating the verses.
Born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1937 and raised in Atlanta, Anderson got his big break when his composition City Lights was recorded by Ray Price in 1958 and topped the country charts. Anderson took full advantage, moving to Nashville and landing a record contract of his own with Decca.
Anderson recorded his biggest hit and signature song, the partly spoken ballad Still, in 1963, and it not only topped the country charts, but was No.8 on the billboard pop chart. Anderson has had seven No.1 hits in the American country music charts and released more than 50 albums.
Happiness appeared on Still, his second album in 1963, but it was not released as a single.
Bill Anderson recently appeared on BBC Four’s Songwriters’ Circle. In the middle of the song he broke to tell the audience how, in the early Seventies, he had played Happiness on his UK tour with Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. An unimpressed journalist wrote: ‘Bill Anderson has a curious habit of pausing in the middle of his songs to recite little poems. Some of which are so sentimental they would make a greeting card blush.’ Anderson joked: ‘From that day on Conway Twitty nicknamed me Hallmark.’
Happiness became Ken Dodd’s signature song. In an interview with the Big Issue magazine he said: ‘I remember singing it the very first time at the Granada in Shrewsbury.
‘The words suit me because I am a believer: “Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that we possess. I thank the Lord that I’ve been blessed with more than my share of happiness.”
‘If you believe there is a great creative force that guides us you have to say thank you. I say thank you for happiness.’
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