New book explores roots of Western pop music and global influences that shaped it

Transcript

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William Brangham: Western pop music has always been influenced by artists and styles from around the world.

A new book aims to give those varied influences, all of them, their due.

Special correspondent Tom Casciato has our story. It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Tom Casciato: A literary event in New York City at the French Consulate’s Villa Albertine, where the topic is musical influences.

David Byrne, Musician: I’d grown up listening to the Beatles singing “Twist and Shout,” things like that. And then I realized much later, I realized, oh, that’s a Cuban rhythm.

Tom Casciato: That’s David Byrne of Talking Heads fame, and the gentleman to his right?

Joe Boyd, Author, “And the Roots of Rhythm Remain”: One way of looking at the history of American music is of a series of shocks.

Tom Casciato: His name is Joe Boyd, and he has a way of showing up where history is made. He was in Paris when a 1964 film captured a tour introducing American blues artists to Europe.

Man: Brownie McGhee and Brownie McGhee

Tom Casciato: That’s him in the hat and sunglasses in 1965, while Bob Dylan is rehearsing “Like a Rolling Stone” at his most famous concert ever, the Newport Folk Festival.

Boyd would become a producer with extraordinary sonic range, from the psychedelia of Pink Floyd, to the pensive folk of Nick Drake, to the jazzy pop of Maria Muldaur.

Nowadays, he’s a writer. His new book, “And the Roots of Rhythm Remain,” is a sweeping look at how sounds the world over have influenced the pop music of the West.

Joe Boyd: Samba, salsa, reggae, Bulgarian women’s choirs, who are the people that create this music? The Western tempered scale was not absolute.

Tom Casciato: From Brazil to Pakistan, Jamaica to South Africa and more, Boyd probes the foundations of the familiar. For example, you might know Ravi Shankar, whose drones and improvisations were a highlight of the film documenting the famed Monterey Pop Festival.

You might know he taught the sitar to Beatle George Harrison. But Boyd brings us the person who gave Ravi his start, his older brother, Uday Shankar.

Joe Boyd: And Uday was this incredible-looking guy. And he formed a dance company. And little Ravi, 11, 12 years old, became a star dancer. He occasionally would pick up the company’s sitar and start playing it.

Tom Casciato: But it was famed musician and teacher Allaudin Khan who got Ravi to be serious.

Joe Boyd: When Khan said, you’re really talented, and you’re throwing it away, if you just practice every once in a while. You want to really be good, come and live with me.

Ravi turned out to be the ideal ambassador for Indian music.

Tom Casciato: Shankar would go on to influence fellow giants, from violinist Yehudi Menuhin to saxophonist John Coltrane.

Joe Boyd: Coltrane felt liberated by the discovery of Indian music and the modal approach where you have a drone. He’s sort of exploring this new world that’s open to him with the corniest, most Western song you can possibly imagine.

Tom Casciato: Corny to some, beloved by legions. “My Favorite Things” went from popular smash to hypnotic jazz classic, as Coltrane applied what he’d learned from India.

Joe Boyd: All through what he did in the ’60s was very influential on other musicians.

And if you listen to that crazy guitar solo on “Eight Miles High,” it’s Ravi Shankar meets John Coltrane.

Tom Casciato: Boyd’s book also shows how music often takes a circuitous path. In 1899, Hawaiian Joseph Kekuku pretty much invented the style in which the guitar is played on your lap as you slide a metal bar across the neck.

Its variations, including pedal steel guitar, would become staples in both country and blues music. But the slide style also made its way to India by way of multi-instrumentalist V.M. Bhatt.

Joe Boyd: V.M. Bhatt was a student of Ravi’s, and he discovered Hawaiian guitar and thought, hmm.

Tom Casciato: In Bhatt’s work, you can hear strains of what came before, but the sound is still unmistakably his own.

To create it, he would develop an instrument, the Mohan veena, played on his lap with a slide bar, but having additional strings like a sitar tuned along the guitar’s neck.

Joe Boyd: And the Indian classical music establishment didn’t like it at all, but he became very popular and they had to accept it. And now he’s a big star in India.

The mainstream culture of the West…

Tom Casciato: In the give-and-take of cultural transmission, some of Boyd’s stories, of course, a lot more take than give.

Joe Boyd: … treated the musicians incredibly badly.

Tom Casciato: Take the case of South African Solomon Linda, who would come from the countryside to Johannesburg, where he would write and record the 1939 hit “Mbube” with his group, the Evening Birds.

Joe Boyd: And there’s a moment where he starts improvising with it.

Tom Casciato: And with that improvisation, a famous melody was born. And the record became huge in South Africa.

The folk group The Weavers misheard the term uyimbube, which means “You are a lion” in Zulu, as wimoweh when they recorded it in 1951. Ten years later, a version by The Tokens, with lyrics now, went all the way to number one. There was another hit version in the ’70s, another in the ’80s.

And in the ’90s, the song provided a comic scene in “The Lion King.”

Actor: The lion sleeps to — I can’t hear you, buddy. Back me up!

Joe Boyd: The amount of money that it generated is astronomical. And Solomon Linda was dead.

Tom Casciato: A 2006 settlement would pay some royalties to Solomon Linda’s but more dispute would follow. I

Joe Boyd: think that is one of the worst examples of influences across cultures that doesn’t get paid for it correctly. And that happened a lot.

But there are lots of different ways to look cross-cultural connection.

Tom Casciato: The Guardian called Boyd’s book epic and inspiring.

Joe Boyd: The bottom-line message in a way is, we’re all connected. And the great thing is that, when anyone tries to replicate the music of another, they always fail. But they very often fail in a wonderful way. Something wonderful comes out of the act of emulation.

Tom Casciato: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Tom Casciato in New York City.