David de Lange - Een van die dae (One of these days, 1940s - subtitled)

When we were little kids my dad loved to take out his guitar and sing for us. And somehow through the fog of time I remember that he loved this guy called David de Lange. But over the years less and less mention was made of de Lange, and the somehow the lyrics of his songs got mixed up when we sang. Eventually I ended up in the USA and never thought of the guy again.

Then came the bombshell. In 2007 Rian Malan wrote a play "Die Nagloper" which told the story of David (see http://youtu.be/WOLAlbk2AvE). In short, de Lange ran afoul of the "guardians" of the Afrikaner establishment. He was a drinker and a womanizer. Even worse in the eyes of the establishment, he hung out with a colored guy (George Abrahams, who is playing the banjo here) and loved to translate African American Jazz into Afrikaans. So David got ostracized, and the FAK (an influential Afrikaner cultural organization) wrote letters to the record labels complaining that his hillbilly type of music was damaging the Afrikaner culture. In the end, despite de Lange's runaway success as a singer, he was banned from the airways. De Lange took to the bottle, and died a few years later -- by all accounts a broken man. No Afrikaans newspaper said a word about his death.

http://www.beeld.com/By/Nuus/Iets-wilds-en-ontembaars-20110214 (Afrikaans)
http://tinyurl.com/3tnzww6 (English, via Google translate)

If it was not for today's technology, and for the efforts of a few music lovers, de Lange's legacy would have died with him. But here we are in a new century and we can rediscover his music again.

I am an Afrikaner myself, and looking back at the devastation this kind of thinking (which was also at the root of the Apartheid ideology) has wrought, I cannot help but feel some sadness and anger. Not only did these people cause immense suffering for the black and "coloured" folk of South Africa, they also stole a part of our cultural heritage. And they almost got away with it. Fortunately those days are now long gone, and we can finally rediscover the true roots of our music.

This song by David de Lange and the "Welgens Suikerbossie Orkes" is an adaptation of the 1910 vaudeville tune by Shelton Brooks (a black dude, no less), called "Some of these Days". It was made popular by Sophie Tucker. In South Africa it was billed as a "vastrap" - a kind of partnered dance associated with boeremusiek (Afrikaner folk music for dancing). Notice however the Dixieland sound. It was released under Gallo Africa's Gallotone label, number GE 340, presumably in the early 1940s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_of_These_Days
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelton_Brooks
http://jass.com/sheltonbrooks/brooks.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Tucker

Some of the musicians on this recording:
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David de Lange - vocals
Willie Welgens - concertina
Rup Meyer - double bass ??
Gert Naudé - guitar ??
George Abrahams - banjo
Dan Truter - clarinet