Marjiet Omar and the Golden City Dixies - Nellie Gray (±1957)
1,242 views · Published 18 August 2011 · 3:08 · Indexed 20 October 2026
Channel: Jan Tak · 2011 · Music
From the time the Dutch East India Company established their first outpost at the Southern tip of Africa to 1808 (when the British abolished the slave trade) around 63,000 slaves were brought into the Cape Colony. To avoid trouble with the local Khoikhoi people, South Africa's slaves were obtained mainly from Indonesia, Madagascar, and India. After the slaves were freed a great number of people of mixed heritage intermingled with the Europeans, remnants of the Khoikhoi, and some Xhosa, to create what became known as the "Coloured" (as opposed to Black) people of South Africa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Coloureds Disadvantaged from the beginning, Apartheid created additional hardship for these folks. However, on the "Tweede Nuwejaar" (Second New Year = January 2nd, which was originally a day off for the farm workers in the Cape) they cast their troubles away and formed groups of "Kaapse Klopse" (Cape Minstrel Bands) which would swarm the city of Cape Town in their brightly colored outfits. Their "Goema" (Dixieland) style of music and merry performances won the hearts of many, and this was the one day in which they would board "whites only" busses and trains and could get away with it -- as long as the ride included a performance. As a white Afrikaner kid growing up in Cape Town I remember those days fondly; however it was not only me who was taken by their music -- soon many of their minstrel songs (e.g. "So lank as die Rietjie in die Water Lê", "Kossies van die Kaap", "Sousboontjies", etc.) found its way into Afrikaner culture and is still regularly sung to this very day. But as this song shows, they could not ignore the parallels between the plight of the black American slaves and their own situation. "Nelly Gray", of course is a traditional African-American folksong set to music by Benjamin Hanby - in which a male slave in Kentucky mourns his beloved, who has been sold to someone in Georgia (where a slave's life was supposed to be even worse). Here then, Marjiet Omar and the Golden City Dixies' lovely rendition of "Nellie Gray" (Darling Nelly Gray), recorded in South Africa around 1957. http://electricjive.blogspot.com/2010/06/carnival-time-in-south-africa.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelly_Gray_%28song%29 Other renditions of (Darling) Nelly Gray already on YouTube: =========================================== Alma Gluck: http://youtu.be/7IVs3xpYcRE The Mills Brothers & Louis Armstrong (1937): http://youtu.be/aUIvfKE01Bo Maxine Sullivan (1937): http://youtu.be/MK7SG5KqTIg Joseph & Dylan Cormier: http://youtu.be/fIZQf9lCGqo
