Music: The Pennywhistlers

Lemmie (“Special”) Mabaso is a twelve-year-old Johannesburg schoolboy who rarely goes to school any more. Instead, he hangs around on street corners tootling a pennywhistle. Lemmie leads his own celebrated band, the “Alexandra Junior Bright Boys,” which started out playing for coppers, by now has made three hit records and gets featured billing at Johannesburg City Hall concerts. Reason: the haunting sound of pennywhistle jazz has become the favorite music of South Africa’s slum-caged blacks—and of a great many white hipsters.

In the dusty streets, urchins rock to the pennywhistle’s fast kwela beat; in shabby speakeasies, women shuffle to its slower marabi rhythm. Among natives who earn only $20 a month, pennywhistle records (75 ¢ apiece) are selling at the rate of 1,000 a day. By this spring, the rage had crossed to Britain, where a song called Tom Hark became the top jukebox hit so fast that record companies have ordered a half dozen new pennywhistle tunes. Princess Margaret herself has cut some kwela steps. Pennywhistle records will soon liven U.S. jukeboxes; American jazzmen (including Clarinetist Tony Scott, Saxophonist Bud Shank, Pianist Claude Williamson) went to Johannesburg to learn and record the new sound.

Originally just a child’s noisemaker, the pennywhistle is a 14-in. bit of metal tubing, drilled with six holes and flattened at one end for a mouthpiece. Though its natural range is one shrill octave, the seasoned player can squeeze out almost another octave. Like the New Orleans Negroes who once fused Dixieland from a great many different sources (including spirituals, marches, French and Spanish dance melodies), the penny whistlers began by imitating bagpipers and American jazz, with the occasional addition of native rhythms. To foreign ears the simple 4/4 tempo of pennywhistle jazz may seem repetitious and childlike. To Africans living in crowded city locations, pennywhistle jazz evokes nostalgic country memories: the swaying of women at tribal weddings, the sound of ancient work songs, the wail of funeral dirges.

Pennywhistle lyrics have also become the urban African’s version of the bush telegraph, warning against fickle women, street fights and raids by the “head-bashers” (white cops). Some titles convey political messages. One called Azi Khwelwa (“We don’t ride” in Zulu) was banned by South African officials after they learned that natives took it as an incitement to boycott Jim Crow buses.

Despite their success, most penny-whistlers still find the going rough. Whistle Virtuoso Fred Maphisa thinks up his tunes while driving a cab; Spokes (“King of the Pennywhistlers”) Mashiyani used to make his living as a domestic servant. But young “Special” Mabaso, who has just turned out a new hit called Serope Sa Ngwanyana (Girls’ Thighs), is optimistic. Says he: “We are professionals now. From now on we are not going to play so much in the streets.”