THE "GROOMING"

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 523, 5 May 1933, Page 7

THE "GROOMING"

LEARNT THE TRICK FROM ZULU j VOCALISTS. BARBE'R'S HARMONY. Manchester, Saturday. There are two types of singers toj day which, for want of a better word, j are both called crooners, says A1 j Bowlly, British dance band singer. j There is the soft-voiced singer who i sings so close to the microphone that he is said to be "kissing the niike." He "puts his stuff over" with' a plaintive intimacy, but his range of expression is limited. He is the "crooner" proper. Then there s the ^inger-crooner whose range varies from a whisper to a volume that will fill the largest h'all. The difference between him and the ordinary singer is that he sings na- | turally instead of artificially, like a a concert artist. He fakes. He is a trick singer. If he cannot sing a note he dodges it, or substitutes another or slurs to an easy range, hut in all giving a pleasant result. His object is to tell the story of the song with feeling and expression. Bing Crosby, the American, who has been described as the King of Crooners, is a singer-crooner of this type. Listen to Bing Crosby singing "Young and Healthy" on the American record in the News Chronicle dance-music comp'etition, and compare his range, volume and expression with those of the crooner who can only whisper. Although crooning is the latest trick of the dance hand vocalist, it is really one of the oldest natural arts. Mothers crooned to their babies when J the eyes of the world were hardly j open. In its present foim it comes to us from the slave days of America. The j slaves crooned as they worked in the j cotton fields and sugar plantations, J and again when the day's work was j done. They probably sang softly in j the first instance, in fear of the plan- j tation owners or managers. Crooping developed in "harbers'.j harmony." Five or six negroes would j meet in the barber's saloon, which, in a tma.ll town, would be attached to a i bar and dance hall. One man would i nv m-r\r\n wllilo tlio rv+llPVR TinmiHfid

OlXl^ Oi. OiOVU ** — - softly in different pitches. I think it is an interesting fact that I owe my ahility in song syncopation to South Africa and not to America.. The jazz idiom was taken by the slaves from the heart of Africa to the States, but it is not generally realised that the idiom also spread southward through Zululand to the Cape. As a youngster I used to attend the song and dance festivals of the Zulu Bechuanaland and Amalita mine hoys. Open-mouthed, with our spines tingling, we youngsters watched hundreds of Zulus, with uplifted assagais, syncopating their tribal songs, stamping out the rhythm with ther hare feet and aancing in "snake hip" fashion. These rhythms got irito my head and I used to adapt thein to ordinary music on my guitar. Many were the hidings I got for syncopating hymn tunes! .s The coloured hoys in the town dance halls of the Cape developed a ballroom variation of this savage dancing of the mines. It was called the gooma dance, and it is pfaetically identical with the "snake hip" style c>f dancing which is now the vogue in Parisian society and in Harlem.