‘And the Roots of Rhythm Remain’: A joyful tour of global music

Joe Boyd has been in the music industry for a long time. He has worked on recordings by Pink Floyd, Richard Thompson, R.E.M., and 10,00 Maniacs. And that’s just the shortlist.

In 1980, he started Hannibal Records, an independent label responsible for releasing numerous international music albums, ranging from Joe King Carrasco to Toumani Diabate.

Joe’s new book, a 17-year project titled “And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey through Global Music,” is an exhaustive history of popular music from around the world that taps into his years of listening, conducting interviews, and the study of music from Budapest to Johannesburg.

WPR’s “BETA” chatted with Boyd about this massive undertaking.

Steve Gotcher: “And the Roots of Rhythm Remain” — the title of your book is a line from a song by Paul Simon. Why did you pick that for the title?

Joe Boyd: Well, it’s a beautiful stanza in that wonderful album, and so much of what I find to be the fingerprint, or the watermark of musical cultures, is rhythm.

When I spoke to Paul Simon, we agreed. We had the same feeling, particularly when he went to Johannesburg. He was excited about the rhythmic strangeness and the complexity of what he was hearing from these great musicians.

I don’t know. It just came to me as a perfect line, as well as the whole stanza. But that line, “and the roots of rhythm remain,” it kind of sums up what I’m writing about.

SG: What kind of impact did Paul Simon’s Graceland have on introducing people to South African music?

JB: Huge. South Africa was something that people had known but without often without realizing it. As Paul Simon described, he heard this music in his car and said it sounded like R&B from a parallel universe.

It sounded familiar, but not. That was the toe-in-the-water into the world music scene in the late 1980s for many. First, it was Graceland, then Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and for many, it was Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens. It was easy for the Western audience to embrace this stuff somehow.

One of the things I wanted to write about in the book was to say, yes, it was easy, and you love it, and it’s great music. But the back story is much more complicated than you might have imagined.

SG: One of the criticisms of Paul Simon, which I have a problem with, is this notion of cultural appropriation, where he allegedly capitalized on somebody else’s music and made a lot of money for himself. But it seems to me that it introduced the world to these musicians who went on and had their own successes worldwide. What do you think about this idea of cultural appropriation and its impact?

JB: I started the book with Malcolm McLaren, who went to South Africa two years before Paul Simon used the same musicians. He registered songs that he learned from them with him as the composer and paid very little. His record is not significant in history because it wasn’t that successful. But Paul paid way more money. He shared copyright credit when it was the actual situation and that he had input into the creation of a song from one of the South African musicians. They got co-credited as composers. And I think he behaved impeccably.

SG: Ry Cooder did the same thing, bringing Cuban music to the world when he got together with the Buena Vista Social Club and helped put that record out.

JB: The Buena Vista Social Club received royalties and toured the world. I have a quote from Mikhail Bakunin later in the book that talks about how to really understand a culture, you must stand outside it.

I think many of the most successful and interesting records are made by producers or people from the outside like Paul Simon and Ry Cooder did. They look at a form of music that people within the culture would never take.

The main point I make in the book is that this “cultural appropriation” story is as old as Methuselah. No music is pure. Every music is mongrel. Every piece of music was created by the intersection of cultures, particularly in Europe. Every form of music in the Balkans and Central Europe was transformed by the arrival of Roma people, who learned the local melodies and played them better than the locals could.

SG: One of the things that fascinates me the most is the notion that new styles and genres are created when music moves from one culture to another and then back again. Can you talk more about how that has evolved over the years?

JB: One of the great examples centers on James Brown. James Brown was a revolutionary within African-American music and rhythm and blues because he took a lot from Latin and Cuban music. He added a clave feel. But most importantly, a lot of his music was very modal. It didn’t change key very much. It would stay on the same key for long stretches of just groove. And that scratch guitar often follows a kind of clave, two beats followed by three beats.

There’s a quote in the book that for African Americans, James Brown’s music was proof that Africa really was over there. And that’s where we came from because it sounded much more like Africa. Then, of course, it went to Africa, and groups all across Africa heard James Brown and went, “Oh yeah, we know where this guy’s coming from.” That transformed their music, with Fela Kuti being one of the great examples.

So you have this circle that keeps going around. There are many compilations now of Nigerian music from the ’70s playing funk.

Another thing that I point out in the book is that so much great music was created when people set out to imitate something and fail but fail gloriously.

SG: Failed in a way that created something entirely new.

JB: Yeah, exactly. Like British art students playing Mississippi Delta Blues, which created the Rolling Stones, and everything else.

SG: You mentioned James Brown, and I was thinking of a record that somebody gave me a cassette of years ago called “Cambodia Rocks.” I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but it’s a bunch of young people like garage bands doing James Brown imitations with a Cambodian spin. 

JB: Well, are you familiar with Dengue Fever?

SG: Yes. Yes. They’ve played here in town a few times.

JB: They’re great, and a fascinating example of taking this kind of Cambodian surf music and trying to play it the way that the Cambodians did, but creating, again, something that’s new but with a music that was obliterated by Pol Pot and reviving it and then stimulating a revival within Cambodia.  

There’s a wonderful documentary about them called “Sleepwalking Through the Mekong.” It’s a terrific film about their first visit to Cambodia.

SG: Who are some other artists who’ve helped introduce global sounds to the West?

JB: You might be able to start with Machito and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars, who set America and the world dancing to Latin music in the ’40s and ’50s.

One of my favorite pieces of research that I conducted was reading Bill Graham’s autobiography, where he talks about being a teenager and going to the Palladium and having his life changed by learning how to dance Latin and how the greatest moment of his life as a professional was when he played his Tito Puente records for Carlos Santana.

He played him Oya Como Va, leading to Santana having a world-changing hit. You could go to any part of the world and hear that song coming out of every bar.

In recent times, Brian Eno and David Byrne have to take some credit. They made this crazy record called “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” which was more influential than commercially successful, and they also put a lot of those same ideas into the Talking Heads because Brian Eno was producing “Remain In Light,” which was such a breath of rhythmic fresh air because it was very much based on Afrobeat. But it’s not slavishly imitating it. It’s just absorbing it.

SG: What kind of message do you want the reader of your book to come away with?

JB: I hope it will lead people to listen to music they’ve never listened to before. One of the reasons I wrote the book was because I have shelves full of music-related books. So many of them are about jazz and R&B.

I’ve got books on the Beatles, the Stones, Joe Cocker and Miles Davis, and I just felt like there’s a big world out there with as many great stories as we have about British and American musicians.  

So, I want to tell those and open people’s eyes and ears to this enormous world. And also how much we owe this world and how much it has influenced us. There is no purity. Everything is connected. And we owe so much to people from across the globe, from people outside our culture.

SG: Well, Joe, I have a new thing to add to my bucket list, which I doubt I will ever fulfill, but I would love to sit down and listen to records with you for an evening. That would be a delight.

JB: What you can do — I hope sooner rather than later — I’ve started a web page that will have links to all the music you read about in the book, so if you read about something, you go to the web page and just click, and it’ll be there.