The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #91552   Message #1743497
Posted By: Azizi
18-May-06 - 06:11 PM
Thread Name: African Music Threads & Posts
Subject: RE: African Music Threads & Posts
thread.cfm?threadid=45180#668744

Subject: RE: Help: Danger Waters - story behind the song?
From: hobbitwoman - PM
Date: 13 Mar 02 - 10:41 PM

Dave, I have a copy of Joan Baez in Concert (Vol. 1) on cd - and you're right - the original album was released in 1962. I have forced my poor aging eyes to read the incredibly small print, and here's what it says:
"Danger Waters: The ethnomusicologists have been tracing African influences on American folk music for decades, but now we find that our folk music, jazz and Latin American rhythyms are being re-exported to Africa and creating new hybrids which in turn will exert a new influence on our music. This lament of a hard-time heroine is from the Gold Coast, created in the "Highlife Cafes" patronized by the poor and less-poor, where a new African-Western-African music of extraordinary poetic and rhythymic strength is now emerging. Beneath the seemingly direct and simple verses is a fluid use of words and images which marks this as poetry of a higher order, a realistic poetry based on the patterns of ordinary speech which makes use of the slashing transitions and many-leveled ambiguities of the finest modern poetry."

I dunno, maybe I'm just tired, but that doesn't make it much clearer to me! It doesn't explain what the song is about - other than a "hard-time herione".

Annie