"Good to My Ear"

The trouble is that she wants to go home--home being a four-room house in Mofolo Village, a South African "location" (Negro reservation) outside Johannesburg. "Down there, if you aren't white, you may be a star, but you're still a nothing," she admits. "But I still want to go home."

Singer Miriam Makeba, a Xosa tribeswoman (full name: Zensi Miriam Makeba Qgwashu ogu vama yi keti le nenxgoma sittu xa saku aga ba ukutsha sithathe izitsha sizi khalu sivuke ngomso sizi chole ezo zinge knayo zinga bikho nfalo singamalamu singa mangamla nagithi*), is probably too shy to realize it, but her return to Africa would leave a noticeable gap in the U.S. entertainment world, which she entered a mere six weeks ago. Miriam Makeba, 27, has had no formal musical training, and a few years ago she still earned her living as a housemaid in Johannesburg, but she is the most exciting new singing talent to appear in many years.

At Manhattan's Blue Angel, a smoky, low-ceilinged saloon-for-sophisticates, she is delighting the customers with the songs and styles she learned as a child. In her high, sweet, reedy voice, the knowing can hear many echoes--of Ella Fitzgerald, whose records she bought as a child, of Harry Belafonte, who helped her get started in the U.S.--but she sings like no one else.

Click of Corks. The close-cropped, woolly head and the sleek white Fifth Avenue gown come from different worlds, but the combination has a charm and grace of its own. In a ballad, she maintains the clean, classic phrasing of a church singer, she can be roguish in a West Indian ditty about a naughty flea, and she can make a chilling lament of A Warrior's Retreat Song--"Jikele maweni ndiyahamba/Jikele maweni indiyahamba," which she says suggests, "We've had it, we can't make it." Memory brings back the "Back of the Moon," a black saloon in Johannesburg, and life bounces suddenly to a bongo rhythm:

Back of the Moon, boys,

Back of the Moon is where the folks unwind.

When Makeba sings or talks in her native Xosa dialect, its expressive staccato clicks sound like the popping of champagne corks. Though she tries many styles, she never sings the Afrikaaner songs of white South Africa ("When Afrikaaners sing in my language," she says, "then I will sing in theirs"). But whatever mood she assumes, Miriam Makeba maintains a simple and primitive stoicism that sets her sharply apart from the emotional, often artificial style of American Negro singers.

The Show Went On. As remarkable as anything about Makeba is the fact that, however arresting her talent, she managed to sing her way out of the anonymity of South African Negro life. Helping her mother in various servants' jobs around Johannesburg, Miriam sang in school, at weddings and funerals. If she could get close to a radio, she tuned in the native songs played on Johannesburg radio stations. "Anyone who sings, makes music." says she, "as long as it's good to my ear."

At 17 she began singing at benefits --some nights for Negroes, some nights for whites. Soon she joined a traveling group called The Black Manhattan Brothers (eleven men and Miriam), and for three years she barnstormed all over Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo and South Africa. "The bus often broke down," Miriam remembers, "and after the first five months I was crying all the time. But they kept telling me the show must go on. We always managed to get there on time."

Miriam finally left the group to join a touring musical variety show, then got the female lead in a Negro jazz opera called King Kong (based on a true story of a prizefighter who killed his mistress). In 1958 restless Singer Makeba applied for a passport, and after a year's wait she was on her way to London. From there she moved on to Manhattan's downtown Village Vanguard, then uptown to the Angel. The little girl from Prospect Township is making $750 a week, which could be eight years' rent for a native family in Johannesburg. RCA Victor is planning to record her songs. But Miriam wants to go home.

* Simply a series of native first names, e.g., Jane, Mary, Ellen, etc.

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