By Ian Brennan
Furious
Though the current hype may lean otherwise, international music’s intermittently seizing the popular imagination is far from a new phenomenon.
In fact, the first major recording star ever was Italian Opera tenor Enrico Caruso, who helped drive the marketing of records as a source of household music. His 1902 release “Vesti la giubba” was the first single to sell over a million copies.
Latin music’s larger role in the evolution of American popular music is often invisibilized. But likely there would have been no rock ‘n’ roll revolution were it not for the “scandalous” Mambo dance craze that immediately preceded it.
In 1955- the year that Elvis brought “rock ‘n’ roll” to the airwaves- Harry Belafonte had two #1 albums. One of them, Calypso, stayed on the charts for 31 weeks- more than half of the year- and was the first LP ever to sell one-million copies.
And right on the heels of the British Invasion, another quieter invasion rose from the South. After recognizing how new recording and amplification technologies allowed for introversion and subtlety, João Gilberto dropped drums as the foundation and rode the insularity of “The Girl from Ipanema” to sales of over two-million copies in America alone.
Though the 1960 debut album Drums of Passion by Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji is rarely spoken about today, it sold over 5-million copies (even more dramatically, if adjusted for the current US population, that would equal almost 9-million copies, an amount that only a rare few superstars like Taylor Swift can even approach in the digital-era).
But maybe most striking is the role Olatunji’s music played in the American Civil Rights movement.
While a student at Morehouse University in Atlanta, it is rumored that Olatunji staged the first bus boycott three years before Rosa Parks did so in Alabama. He and some friends entered a segregated bus and were allowed to sit in the White section of the bus since they were wearing traditional African clothing. The racist and convoluted laws of the Jim Crow south didn’t identify African citizens as subject to the same restrictions as African Americans.
The next day, Olatunji and his partners deliberately boarded the same bus, but this time, they were commanded to sit in the back due to their wearing American street clothes. Though threatened with arrest, they refused to move and continued to sit in the section denied to African Americans.
Due to having been the President of the student body at Morehouse, during the 1950s, Olatunji met and befriended both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, as their respective profiles rose. Each saw Olatunji’s drumming as beneficial to the political rallies that they were staging.
Olatunji was among the guests at Reverend King’s “I Have a Dream” speech during 1963’s March on Washington, overshadowed among such luminaries as James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, and Sidney Poitier.
Long before Afrobeats or K-Pop, Olatunji’s drumming helped unify and pave a pathway to greater freedoms in America.
Olatunji later appeared on such television programs as the Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and John Coltrane’s song “Tunji” was dedicated to Mr. Olatunji, and Coltrane played his last concert (which resulted in the album The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording) at The Olatunji Center for African Culture, which Olatunji founded in Harlem in 1965.
Mr. Babtunde died one day short of his 76th birthday in 2003 and ultimately released sixteen albums across his lifetime. He also contributed to the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart’s Planet Drum project and collaborated with such artists as Carlos Santana, Stevie Wonder, Taj Mahal, Serge Gainsbourg, and Quincy Jones.
Ian Brennan is a Grammy-winning music producer (Tinariwen, Parchman Prison Prayer, The Good Ones [Rwanda]) who has recorded in the field over fifty records by international artists across five continents (Africa, Europe, North America, South America, Asia). He is the author of ten books and his latest is Missing Music: voices from where the dirt roads end.
Also see this interview with Olatunji
