In 1950, Hugh Tracey, a British-born ethnomusicologist, travelled to Kapkatet, Kenya, to record the native songs of the Kipsigis, a pastoral tribe based in the western highlands of the Rift Valley. Tracey had been studying African music since 1921, when he followed his older brother, Leonard, from Devonshire to Zimbabwe—then Southern Rhodesia—to help farm tobacco, on land that Leonard had been allotted by the British government following his service in the First World War. In 1929, Tracey took fourteen local African men to a recording session in Johannesburg, five hundred miles to the south. The records they made there were, in Tracey’s words, “the first items of indigenous Rhodesian music to be recorded and published.”
Tracey would spend the next several decades crisscrossing the continent with a portable recording machine, making disks of native African folk music; many of his recordings are singular and plainly beautiful. There is something stubborn, if not autocratic, about the folklorist’s mission. Figures like Tracey insisted, sometimes brazenly, on the preservation of historic traditions, even when their primary practitioners had already let those customs shrivel on the vine, or weren’t particularly interested in making a material history of them, or had their own means of non-commercial safeguarding. The kind of impulse that Tracey felt is equal parts imperious and visionary.
Still, it’s hard not to admire and be grateful for Tracey’s hubris: a privileged interloper (a beneficiary of colonialism!) parachuting in to make amends, or at least attempt to slow the damage. Colonial governments were predictably unsupportive of the whole undertaking. Tracey received a Carnegie Fellowship for fieldwork in 1931, but his report, which included indictments of missionary churches and the ways in which they sometimes suppressed or erased traditional cultures, was too controversial to publish. Many of the tribes that Tracey met were flummoxed by his presence, and he later described the work as largely thankless: “At that time the public showed little interest in African music and did not understand why I constantly stressed the social and artistic value of the music for future generations of Africans,” he wrote in the catalogue notes to his “The Music of Africa” LPs. (He made two hundred and ten full-length records from his field recordings, some of which were released commercially, in the nineteen-seventies.) “In addition, recordings of tribal music, however good, were not considered to have commercial value, as they would appeal only to a limited audience which was familiar with the dialect in question, few, if any, of whom would have the necessary apparatus on which to play them.”
In 1950, on his trip through the Rift Valley, Tracey collected three vernacular songs about a creature called Chemirocha, a mystical half-man, half-antelope figure, beloved by the Kipsigis for his lunatic singing and dancing. The most transfixing of the three sides, “Chemirocha III” is credited to “Chemutoi Ketienya with Kipsigis girls,” and was described by Tracey as “humorous” in his notes, although the record sounds, to me, like an emanation from some heaven or another.
The girls are accompanied by a lone kibugandet, a four-stringed lyre, played by Ketienya, and they sing in Kipsigis, the Nilo-Saharan language native to the region.* The track is a minute and a half long. A female voice sings the melody alone, while at least one other young woman provides backing vocals. The lead singer’s voice is high, soft, and mossy. Every once in a while, for a note or two, she and her backer fall into perfect harmony, and when this happens it feels as if some new chamber of your heart has just been pried open. They are singing about dancing so hard your pants fall off—about a joy so full that it can’t be mediated. “Chemirocha III” is included on Tracey’s “The Music of Africa: Musical Instruments 1: Strings” LP, from 1972. Each time it’s over, I immediately trot back to my turntable to reset the stylus.
Tracey believed that the indigenous music of Africa was being slowly eradicated and that this was a grave tragedy, and he was right. But while the impulse toward preservation is laudable—Tracey wanted to protect something he respected, and was acting in service of a population he loved—very few creative expressions, no matter how remote, are ever actually free of foreign winds. “Chemirocha III,” it turns out, is no exception. The more the Kipsigi girls repeat the song’s title—with a deliberate pause between the second and third syllable, as if it were two words, Chimi Rocha, Chimi Rocha, Chimi Rocha—the more it becomes clear that, as Tracey discovered, the Kipsigi girls were in fact singing the name of the American country star Jimmie Rodgers.
At some point between 1927 and 1950, a handful of 78-r.p.m. records containing songs yodelled by Rodgers were brought to East Africa, played on portable turntables, and then left behind by Christian missionaries. Rodgers has long been considered one of the forefathers of commercial country music; at the time of his death, in 1933 (he died young, of tuberculosis), he accounted for nearly ten per cent of RCA Victor’s record sales. Rodgers’s “blue yodels,” in which his voice leaps and undulates wildly—maybe in an approximation of a lonesome train whistle, a sound that Rodgers, who had worked for years as a brakeman on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad, had likely internalized—were hugely popular. Bob Dylan later said that Rodgers’s yodel “defies the rational and conjecturing mind.”
Rodgers's work was itself an amalgamation, a mix of blues, jazz, gospel, and other vernacular traditions, including cowboy and hobo songs. He said that he picked up yodelling after he caught a troupe of Swiss emissaries doing a demonstration at a church. (The country singer Riley Puckett, a member of the Skillet Lickers, was yodelling even earlier, in 1924.) The Chemirocha-as-Jimmie-Rodgers story can seem apocryphal—it is too strange, too funny—but both Tracey and the Kipsigis themselves later corroborated and repeated it. “Chemirocha III” is the sound of Rodgers’s strange, melancholy warble, refracted through the imaginations of giddy Kenyan girls. And it is captivating.
“The Kipsigis,” an academic monograph written by the anthropologist Ian Orchardson, in 1961, suggests that when Kipsigi children sing, they also move. “The singing is always accompanied by dancing, or rather body movements of all kinds: head, neck, hands, arms, waist, hips, knees, and least of all, the feet.” Unlike Kipsigi adults, who usually sing in a low, humming voice, the children perform outside and “at the very top of their voices.” I find this to be a deeply beguiling image: a gaggle of riled-up kids, hollering, shifting their bodies every which way. Their songs are rhythmic, nearly mesmeric, but never feature percussion. (“Drums are not used by the Kipsigis and are despised as noisy instruments popular with their western neighbors,” Orchardson observed.) He also describes an inherent ephemerality to these pieces, which were largely improvised. “Most songs do not last more than a year, but some particularly catchy ones, in a constantly amended form, remain in the repertory for as long as four or five years.”
In 1954, Tracey founded the International Library of African Music, or ILAM, at Rhodes University, in South Africa; it remains the largest archive of African music in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2015, a team from ILAM (led by its present director, the ethnomusicologist and professor Diane Thram, and by Tabu Osusa, who runs the nonprofit Ketubul Music) returned to the Rift Valley to repatriate Tracey’s recordings—to give them back to the villages where they were made. They managed to find one man, Cheriyot Arap Kuri, who was recorded by Tracey that day (he sings “Chemirocha I”), and who was now eighty-eight years old. In a video produced by the advocacy organization Singing Wells, a partner of Ketubul Music, Kuri speaks about the experience through a translator: “We never understood what the white man was doing. But we were just singing for him, and just having fun and singing for the white man,” he said. “We did not know that we were recorded.” He is dressed beautifully, and wears a neat goatee. Thram offers him a CD, which he accepts. He turns it over in his hands, regarding it with friendly skepticism.
The story of “Chemirocha III” feels like an object lesson in the inadvertent benefits of intercultural melding, and of the slipperiness of “purity” itself—as a musical idea, or otherwise. The fact that a record of mid-century African field recordings made by a British folklorist contains a Kenyan folk song inspired by an early country singer from Meridian, Mississippi, himself supposedly inspirited by Swiss yodellers and Celtic hymns and African-American gandy dancers, themselves the descendants of slaves brought to America from Africa, is dizzying, but it still raises important questions about how culture actually moves. It is tempting to idolize hermetic and theoretically uncompromised sounds as the most authentic expressions of a folk tradition, and to want to isolate and protect those forms from encroaching or invading tides—we cry “cultural appropriation!” when the borrowing feels odious, and then shake our heads, disheartened. But should more of our energy go toward the peaceful intermingling of musical traditions, rather than their segregation? “Chemirocha III,” at least, seems to argue as much.
Of course, not all cultural exchanges are undertaken in good faith—Christian missionaries and the Imperial British East Africa Company were not invited to Kenya, nor were they happily received—but, every once in a while, distant and distinct societies meet, and the resulting fission produces something unexpected and sublime. This idea seems more urgent than ever to recall, and hold close.
* A previous version of this article misidentified Chemutoi Ketienya’s role in the recording of “Chemirocha III.”
