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Artist
Johnny Clegg
12+ albums
south africanafricanworldWorld Musicsouth africa
about
Johnny Clegg (Jonathan Clegg, 7 June 1953 – 16 July 2019) was a South African musician and anthropologist who recorded and performed with his bands Juluka and Johnny Clegg and Savuka, and as a solo act, occasionally reuniting with his earlier band partners. Sometimes called Le Zoulou Blanc, he is an important figure in South African popular music history, with songs that mix Zulu with English lyrics and African with various Western music styles. Clegg was born in Bacup, Lancashire, to an English father and a Rhodesian mother. Clegg's mother's family were Jewish immigrants from Poland, and Clegg had a secular Jewish upbringing, learning about the Ten Commandments but refusing to have a bar mitzvah or even associate with other Jewish children at school. His parents divorced when he was still an infant, and he moved with his mother to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and then, at the age of 6, to South Africa, also spending less than a year in Israel during childhood. As an adolescent in Johannesburg's northern suburbs, he encountered the demi-monde of the city's Zulu migrant workers' music and dance. Under the tutelage of Charlie Mzila, a flat cleaner by day and musician by night, Clegg mastered both the Zulu language and the maskandi guitar and isishameni dance styles of the migrants. Clegg's involvement with black musicians often led to arrests for trespassing on government property and for contravening the Group Areas Act. He was first arrested at the age of 15 for violating apar
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