1928-1933  Into Africa

You will hardly believe the next thing that happened to me! 

It was 1928, and I was enjoying an evening of ‘new music’ in one of Frankfurt’s night clubs, where Fritz Hoffmann was obviously appreciating the freedom and variety of new post-war sounds!   Kurt Weill was particularly popular.  Into the bar came a young man whose features reminded me of my special English family, the Richardsons – and here indeed was Raymond Stuart Richardson, the twenty-five year old son of Herbert, a brother of my faithful Local Preaching carpenter friend, John Richardson. Raymond had grown up in Harrow, and had been very close to his cousin, Leslie Richardson, who became the father of my most recent owner Harvey Richardson!   Although there were distinct bodily and facial features, Raymond looked and sounded more of an adventurous and free spirit, something not readily attributed to his other, somewhat ‘Victorian’ members of his family.

(Raymond [back row under ‘Pretty Corner’ sign] with other Richardsons)

Indeed, it transpired that Raymond became known as the ‘black sheep’ of the family.  I could tell he was mixing with a very questionable crowd in this Frankfurt bar, and I was worried that he was dealing in some kind of illegal trade with a group of right-wing agitators.

The upshot of this ‘chance Richardson encounter’ was an agreement struck between Fritz (Hoffmann) and Raymond. I was sold – there and then  – to Raymond for a knock-down price, even though I was not Fritz’s property to sell!  [I have never discovered what Nelly Barth had to say about this]. 

The next morning I was on a train to Hamburg to join the RMS ‘Aba’ bound for Sekondi-Takoradi on the Gold Coast in West Africa!

(RMS ABA)

For the next 5 years I accompanied Raymond on numerous trips back and forth from Africa to England, and I became something of a ‘spectacle’ for many people. To my amazement, on one occasion, while staying in Uganda, Raymond sought out yet another Richardson cousin – Anna Pordage – who owned a property in Senda, Buganda.  Anna was the daughter of Christopher Richardson, whose mother Elizabeth was yet another of John Richardson’s siblings, back in Norfolk.  Anna’s husband Frederick had been a British Civil Servant, in Zanzibar and Uganda, and died in Entebbe in 1912.

    For me, during these ‘safaris’, I became fascinated by African musical sounds and inflexions, so very different from the Western traditional way of making music.  It was not long before I remembered, and began to resonate, with the powerful influences of the Florida plantation workers’ upon Frederick Delius back in the 1880s.  There is something about the way Africans use the whole of their body while singing and playing. There is very little awareness, or even need, for written textual symbols and notation.    The freedoms displayed by this natural African style entered the musical universe, most notably through the medium of Jazz, and the world has been enriched and changed – never to be the same again.

I wish those who play me would use the whole of their body!  I also wish we could learn from Africa that knowledge is conveyed in and through the body, with all our feelings and emotions, not solely through the ‘mind’

While in East Africa, I noticed how African religion and African music were inextricably intertwined. The place of drums and drumming seemed to play an almost ‘sacred’ part in African spiritual life, especially with the importance placed upon ancestor worship and calling up of honoured family members.  In no way was music – and particularly its rhythmic nature – diminished into a form ‘entertainment’; it was an essential living and experiential expression of life, accompanying every aspect of human behaviour.  As you know, I am deeply aware of all the complicated Western academic and analytical struggles regarding the meeting place of religion and music, and they were of little interest or consequence in this African environment.  It struck me how the African need to shake off the yoke of Western colonisation could well be understood in fresh ways if only the heavy Germanic/Western musical influences were seen in a less dominant way, and perhaps with more rhythmic subtlety and feeling.

The thing that came home to me most forcibly was the way the ‘heart’ was more important than the ‘head’.  When we visited East Africa there was a dramatic Christian evangelical Revival emerging throughout Uganda, Ruanda and Kenya.  ‘Heart’ religion was clearly more significant than any ‘head’ religion. Books, academic enquiry, criticism were off limits, and lay missionaries were often highly suspicious of ordained clergy.  However, I was horrified by the way the singing, and music making, at vast revival rallies often depended upon very dull, unimaginative musical styles from the old-fashioned Keswick Convention Hymn Book imposed by British missionaries.

I have been unable to shake off the recurring conflict of ‘head’ sounds and ‘heart’ sounds which have been grafted into my very bones, my whole body and sounding board.  Is there something of a basic dichotomy between ‘analysis’ and ‘emotion’ in all this?

Whatever we make of it, this is a fundamental and recurrent conflict, and it shaped my voice, most notably in these African years after the War.