Joseph Shabalala — Ladysmith Black Mambazo founder
Joseph Shabalala, the gentlevoiced South African songwriter whose choir, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, brought Zulu music to listeners worldwide, died Tuesday in a hospital in Pretoria, South Africa. He was 78.
The cause was not immediately known, but his health had deteriorated after he had back surgery in 2013, said the group’s manager, Xolani Majozi, who announced the death.
Shabalala began leading choral groups at the end of the 1950s. By the early 1970s his Ladysmith Black Mambazo — in Zulu, “the black ax of Ladysmith,” a town in KwaZuluNatal province — had become one of South Africa’s most popular groups, singing about love, Zulu folklore, rural childhood memories, moral admonitions and Christian faith.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s collaborations with Paul Simon on the 1986 album “Graceland,” on the tracks “Homeless” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” introduced South African choral music to an international pop audience.
In 1987 Simon produced Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s first majorlabel album, “Shaka Zulu,” which won a Grammy Award. The group went on to enjoy global recognition, including four more Grammys, decades of extensive touring, and guest appearances with Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, Josh Groban, George Clinton and many others.
Nelson Mandela called Ladysmith Black Mambazo “South Africa’s cultural ambassadors to the world.”
Joseph Shabalala — his full name was Bhekizizwe Joseph Siphatimandla Mxoveni Mshengu Bigboy Shabalala — was born Aug. 28, 1941, near the town of Ladysmith, where his parents, Jonathan Mluwane Shabalala and Nomandla Elina Shabalala, worked on a whiteowned farm.
In 1958 he left to find factory work in the port city of Durban, about 200 miles away. There he sang with the group Highlanders before returning to Ladysmith and starting a group, the Black Ones, with some of his brothers and cousins in 1960.
Shabalala often said that a series of dreams he had in 1964 led him to reshape the music of the group, which became Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He refined an a cappella Zulu choir style called isicathamiya — “stalking style” — that had grown out of song-and-dance competitions in hostels for migrant mineworkers, an urban adaptation of rural traditions.
Shabalala’s version of isicathamiya was built on plush bassheavy harmonies, call-and-response drive and dramatic contrasts of soft and loud passages, along with choreography that included tiptoeing moves and headhigh kicks.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo triumphed at local competitions in the 1960s. In 1970, it performed for a live radio broadcast from Johannesburg. That performance soon led to a recording contract, and the group released dozens of albums on South African labels, adapting Zulu traditional songs.
The group was invited to perform at festivals in Germany beginning in 1980, and it appeared in “Rhythm of Resistance,” a documentary about South African music by Jeremy Marre, which is where Simon first heard them. When he met Shabalala in Johannesburg, Simon invited him to collaborate.
“He came to me like a child asking his father, ‘Can you teach me something?’ ” Shabalala recalled in the liner notes to the expanded 2016 reissue of “Graceland.” “He was so polite. That was my first time to hug a white man.”
The group recorded “Homeless,” merging Simon’s material with a Zulu wedding song, in 1985 at Abbey Road Studios in London.
In May 1986, Ladysmith Black Mambazo performed “Homeless,” which had not yet been released, with Simon on “Saturday Night Live.”
While in New York, the group recorded another song with Simon, “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” Ladysmith Black Mambazo joined Simon’s international “Graceland” tour in 1986 and 1987.
The group resumed its own recording and touring career with vastly expanded opportunities. Through the next decades, Ladysmith Black Mambazo appeared on “Sesame Street” and “The Tonight Show.” It performed when Nelson Mandela received his
Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 and a year later at Mandela’s inauguration as president of South Africa.
The group appeared on Broadway, providing music for a 1993 play about apartheid, “The Song of Jacob Zulu,” and Shabalala collaborated with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company and the playwright Ntozake Shange on a musical based on one of his songs, “Nomathemba.”
Ladysmith Black Mambazo also recorded steadily, collaborating with pop and rock musicians on the 2006 album “Long Walk to Freedom” and reaching back to Shabalala’s childhood with “Songs From a Zulu Farm” in 2011.
In 2014, Shabalala announced his retirement from Ladysmith Black Mambazo; three of his sons — Sibongseni, Thamsanqa and Thulani — are in the current lineup of the group, which canceled its current tour on hearing of his death.
Shabalala’s wife of three decades, Nellie, was murdered in 2002. His survivors include his wife, Thokozile Shabalala; two daughters; four more sons; and 36 grandchildren.