July
17, 1900 Death in Sydney,
Australia, of Orpheus
Myron McAdoo (Bill McAdoo; b. 1858), African-American 'black minstrel' singer who toured
Europe, South Africa and Australia with McAdoo's American Minstrels and McAdoo's Alabama
Cakewalkers.
In 1876 McAdoo graduated from Hampton Normal and
Agricultural Institute (founded in 1868 at Hampton, Virginia by Northern
philanthropists, notably General Samuel Chapman
Armstrong) and taught in
Virginia schools before returning to teach at his alma mater. In 1881 he took
the place of his fellow student, African American educator and
author
Booker T
Washington (1856 - 1915), in charge of the Native
American boy students' dormitory.
Before commencing his own theatrical company in 1890 (mostly composed
of fellow Hampton graduates - see Booker T
Washington's papers), he had been one of the
troupe of the eminent bass singer Frederick J Loudin and the Fisk
Jubilee Singers (pictured above), who first arrived in Australia at
Melbourne on May 14, 1886. The Fisk style of music included cakewalks and spirituals.
McAdoo took ill of unknown causes about 16 months before
his death. He returned to the US, and came back to Sydney, apparently in good
health, but on April 28 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that
"During the week Mr. McAdoo has suffered from a somewhat serious attack of
illness". His death
certificate gives as the cause of death, "Pernicious anaemia; Dilation
of the heart; Cerebral anaemia sycope".
Like his Sydney contemporaries Henry Lawson, Henry Kendall, Dorothea Mackellar, JF Archibald and Victor Daley and numerous other Australian celebrities, McAdoo's grave is in Waverley Cemetery
at Bronte, a suburb of Sydney. After the funeral, his widow Mattie Allen McAdoo
and their son Myron returned to America, breaking with the troupe in 1903. Tenor
RH Collins became the troupe's manager; Orpheus's brother Eugene was basso and
treasurer.
On October 6, 1900, a letter from a performer named Mr Willis Gauze,
apparently a sometime female impersonator, appeared in the Freeman,
denying certain unstated rumours about McAdoo, and adding, "we mourn for
him as manager and gentleman – for a better man never lived – and his
treatment of us was so very nice that we say, may his soul rest in peace. The
minstrel company he brought out was the cause of his death. I never traveled
with such people before."
McAdoo,
Solomon Linda and 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'
Before McAdoo's death the McAdoo Jubilee Singers had extensive tours in South Africa until hostilities began in the Boer War. McAdoo was shocked by the racism he saw and wrote to the Hampton Institute:
"There is no country in the world where prejudice
is so strong as here in Africa. The native today is treated as badly as ever the
slave was treated in Georgia. Here in Africa the native laws are most unjust;
such as the Christian people would be ashamed of. Do you credit a law in a
civilized community compelling every man of dark skin, even though he is a
citizen of another country to be in his house by 9 o' clock at night, or he is
arrested? Before I go into parts of Africa, I had to get a passport and a
special letter from the governors and presidents of the transvall [sic] and the Orange
Free States, or we would have all been arrested. Black people who are seen out
after 9 o' clock must have passes from their masters, indeed, it is so strict
that natives have to get passes for day travel…. I met a few colored men,
Americans, living here. One opened a business in Johannesburg and before he
could open, he had to get a white man to allow him to use his name, because no
Negro is allowed to have his own business."
Many indigenous Africans were no doubt influenced and
inspired by the visitors as role model, as they had not long ago been slaves
themselves. Orpheus Myron McAdoo's legacy in Africa and the world is far
reaching for in the 1890s
it was his singers who popularised African American spirituals
in South Africa through their widespread touring – two separate tours
totalling eight years.
McAdoo's syncopations and American styles reached deep
into South Africa, in mining towns and bush villages. It reached as far as Gordon Memorial School,
above a valley called Msinga, in Zulu country about 300 miles southeast of Johannesburg.
A generation later, the sounds influenced a pupil of that school, Solomon Linda, who
formed a group called Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds
(photo).
Solomon Linda wrote a song called 'Mbube', Zulu for
'the lion', and recorded it in the Evening Birds' second session, in
Johannesburg in 1939 after they had been 'discovered' by a talent scout. The
song's lyrics told the tale of a group of men hunting a sleeping lion; the song was a
South
African hit, selling about 100,000 copies during the 1940s. Pete Seeger, the
American folk musician, heard the compelling song in 1949 and in 1951 cut it himself with his band, The Weavers, calling it 'Wimoweh', making it a
Number 6 hit in the USA.
The song has been
recorded by Jimmy Dorsey,
Yma Sumac, Glen Campbell, Roger Whittaker, New
Christie Minstrels, Stylistics, Tremeloes, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Chet Atkins, Arthur Fiedler and the
Boston Pops
Orchestra, They Might Be Giants, The Kingston Trio, Brian Eno, R.E.M.
('The Sidewinder
Sleeps Tonite'), Miriam Makeba,
Barry Manilow, and
many others, with The Tokens' version being a global smash
hit in 1961. Among the many
languages it has been recorded in apart from the original Zulu,
are French, Japanese, Spanish and Danish. In 2000, Rolling Stone estimated that
'Mbube' had earned at least $15 million in composer royalties. Everyone made money off it – except Solomon
Linda:
"... 'Wimoweh' lived on, bewitching jazz ace Jimmy Dorsey, who covered it in 1952, and the sultry Yma Sumac, whose cocktail-lounge version caused a minor stir a few years later. Toward the end of the decade, it was included on Live From the Hungry I, a monstrously popular LP by the Kingston Trio that stayed on the charts for more than three years (178 weeks), peaking at Number Two. By now, almost everyone in America knew the basic refrain, so it would have come as no particular surprise to find four nice Jewish teenagers popping their fingers and going ah-weem-oh-way, ah-weem-oh-way in the summer of 1961 ...
"The Tokens knew 'Wimoweh' through their lead singer, Jay, who'd learned it off an old Weavers album ...
"So George Weiss took 'Wimoweh' home with him and gave it a careful listen. A civilized chap with a Juilliard degree, he didn't much like the primitive wailing, but the underlying chant was OK, and parts of the melody were very catchy. So he dismantled the song, excised all the hollering and screaming, and put the rest back together in a new way. The chant remained unchanged, but the melody - Solomon Linda's miracle melody - moved to center stage, becoming the tune itself, to which the new words were sung: 'In the jungle, the mighty jungle' and so
on ...
"Within a month, Karl Denver's cover was Number One in England, too. By April 1962 the song was topping charts almost everywhere and heading for immortality. Miriam Makeba sang her version at JFK's last birthday party, moments before Marilyn Monroe famously lisped, "Happy Birthday, Mister President!". Apollo astronauts listened to it on the takeoff pads at Cape Canaveral. It was covered by the Springfields, the Spinners, the Tremeloes and Glen Campbell. In 1972 it returned to the charts, at Number Three, in a version by Robert John. Brian Eno recorded it in 1975. In 1982 it was back at Number One in the U.K., this time performed by Tight Fit. R.E.M. did it, as did the Nylons and They Might Be Giants. Manu Dibango did a twist version. Some Germans turned it into heavy metal. A sample cropped up on a rap epic titled 'Mash up da Nation'. Disney used the song in
The Lion King, and then it got into the smash-hit theatrical production of the same title, currently playing to packed houses in six cities around the world. It's on the original Broadway cast recording, on dozens of kiddie CDs with cuddly lions on their covers and on an infinite variety of nostalgia compilations. It's more than sixty years old, and still it's
everywhere.
"What might all this represent in songwriter royalties and associated revenues? I put the question to lawyers around the world, and they scratched their heads. Around 160 recordings of three versions? Thirteen movies? Half a dozen TV commercials and a hit play? Number Seven on Val Pak's semi-authoritative ranking of the most-beloved golden oldies, and ceaseless radio airplay in every corner of the planet? It was impossible to accurately calculate, to be sure, but no one blanched at $15 million. Some said 10, some said 20, but most felt that $15 million was in the ball park.
"Which raises an even more interesting question: What happened to all that loot?
..." Read on
In July
2004 the song became the subject of
a lawsuit between Solomon Linda's family and the Disney corporation,
with claims that Disney owes $1.6 million in royalties for its use in the film The Lion
King.
Black and
white minstrels in Oz
The McAdoo Jubilee Singers, who had become almost naturalised
Australians, continued Down Under up until World War One, by which time they had
toured all the states (including distant Western Australia), and New Zealand. By
1905 the minstrels included several white Australians, and Miss Claire Solly, a
Western Australian Aboriginal contralto.
(Thank you Gary from Nugrape Records
for providing me with much information. Recommended reading is Abbott,
Lyn, and Seroff,
Doug, Out
of Sight: The rise of African American popular music, University Press
of Mississippi, Jackson, USA, 2002)
"Orpheus McAdoo was born in 1858 in
Greensborough, North Carolina. As a young man he attended the Hampton
Institute in Hampton, Virginia, where he studied and graduated as a teacher in
1876. Before turning to music as a professional career in 1886, he taught
school in Pulaski and Accomack Counties in the state of Virginia for ten
years. In 1886 he toured Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Far East after
joining five members of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers.
"Upon his return to the U.S. a year or two later
McAdoo formed his own company by recruiting some ex-students and graduates
from Hampton, amongst whom was his future wife Mattie Allen and his brother
Eugene. With a newly formed troupe consisting of six women and four men,
McAdoo set sail on a European tour in 1888. Two years later we found them
arriving in Cape Town, South Africa. Their appearance was to create a
significant impact upon the music scene, as it later influenced the creation
and formation of the Kaapse Klopse, or Coon Carnival."
Source: The
Development of Jazz in South Africa
"The American Missionary Association (AMA) in 1866 established the Fisk School to
educate newly freed slaves in Tennessee, but within a year the school faced closure because of
financial debt. George White, Fisk's treasurer and choir director, decided in 1871 to raise money by taking nine of his best students on a musical
tour. Almost ready to quit after early audiences displayed little enthusiasm for their music, the talented singers decided to give a concert made up entirely of
"slave songs" – songs they had learned as slaves or from their enslaved relatives. This music moved audience members to
tears and opened wallets to support Fisk's educational mission. From that point on, the Jubilee
Singers performed only arrangements of slave songs. They toured American and European cities,
singing to enthusiastic crowds that included President Ulysses S. Grant and Queen Victoria of
England. Though some members left the group due to exhaustion and disillusionment with
race relations in America, the reconfigured Jubilee Singers maintained a grueling schedule of
musical performances and fund raising for Fisk University." Source
(has list of singers)
"Among the initial religious contributions of
African Americans to black South Africans were the musical performances of
Orpheus McAdoo's Jubilee Singers. They toured South Africa on three extended
visits between 1890 and 1898, appearing before hundreds of black and white
audiences. Their concerts, featuring spirituals and folk songs, left indelible
impressions on African composers and choirs and their performance styles that
are still evident today." Source
"Following the first tour of the Georgia
Minstrels,a number of other black troupes were to follow with an off-shoot of
the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers arriving in Australia in 1886 &
touring extensively throughout Australiasia [sic] with great success.
From this first troupe of Fisk Jubilee Singers, Mr. O.M. McAdoo was to see the
potential of future ventures & toured Australasia & Africa with his
own jubilee & minstrel company over the proceeding years until his
untimely death in Sydney on the 17th July,1900. His theatrical companies
contained some of the best black minstrel acts as well as singers/musicians to
ever appear in Australia, with such stars as William James Ferry (Ferry the
frog), Billy McClain, Miss Flora Batson, C.W.Walker, Prof.Henderson Smith,
etc. (Billy McClain originally came to Australia with M.B.Curtis's Afro-
Americans).
"F.J.Loudin's Fisk Jubilee Singers original tour spurned many derivative
organisations besides the McAdoo troupe of jubilee singers with Huntley
Spencer (former member of the Era Comedy Four with Hugo's American Minstrels)
being associated with a troupe of Fisk jubilee singers as late as 1936 in New
Zealand. Numerous Australian & New Zealand performers were to be in one of
the many "Fisk Jubilee Singers" groups to have flourished following
the visit of Loudin's Fisk Jubilee singers in 1886." Source
Footnote: I assume that
McAdoo prospered quite well in South Africa. According to Booker T Washington's
archives, in April, 1971, McAdoo contributed $25,
a large sum at the time, to a fund for a testimonial for a Miss Mary F Mackie of
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, who had given 20 years of faithful
service (possibly one of his former teachers?).
Do you have any more information on minstrels, such as
McAdoo, the Fisk
Jubilee Singers, Virginia
Jubilee Singers and Robert
Bradford Williams as they pertain to Australia? If so, I am interested –
please contact your almanackist.
