Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Johnny Clegg

RIP to the great Johnny Clegg. To take nothing away from Paul Simon's "Graceland," a great album, Johnny Clegg was the true father of South African rock, hanging out with the Zulu migrant workers of Johannesburg as a teen, loving the music, loving the people he encountered, and putting it all together in ways that Simon later borrowed in the mid-1980s. He was a wondrous musician and a good man, standing against apartheid at a time when such a stance was costly from both a personal and economic standpoint.

It was a cruel, crazy beautiful world when Johnny recorded this song. Sadly, it still is.



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