Excavated Shellac Digs Into the Roots of East African Music

Jonathan Ward returns with a rich label-by-label history of early 78 rpm recordings from East Africa, uncovering the region’s first stars, sessions and sonic exports.

The first lines of Jonathan Ward’s new writing on early recordings from East Africa zoom from general to specific in a few brief words: “The year 1930 was an extremely active one for multinational record companies. The situation in East Africa was no exception.”

The Los Angeles-based Ward is one of the most authoritative writers and researchers on early African records. In 2011, he curated the massive Opeka Pende: Africa at 78 RPM set for Dust-to-Digital, which used as its springboard Excavated Shellac, a blog he started in 2007 on the music he loves. The project continued with Strings and Reeds, a pair of global surveys of stringed and reed instrument recordings from 78s. He followed that with the essential 2020 release An Alternate History of the World’s Music — a four-CD box set with a deeply researched book — that earned a Grammy nod for Best Historical Album and confirmed Ward as a crucial voice in archival sound preservation.

As with all of Ward’s writing, you’ll exit his new research on early East African records with so much new context that you’ll experience more recent music from Ethiopia, Kenya, Burundi, and elsewhere with fresh ears. It’s his first post on Excavated Shellac in nearly three years, and it feels like he’s spent the entire time working on it.

“What is ‘East Africa’ anyway?,” Ward asks. “Today, at its broadest definition, it runs from Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa to the southern border of present-day Mozambique, including all the island nations and dependencies. In 1930, at least as far as record companies were concerned, ‘East Africa’ was more narrowly defined (though it would expand).”

Ward then offers a label-by-label rundown of their work in East Africa. Here’s one of his paragraphs on Gramophone Records.

Records were already in urban areas of East Africa – but none featured local music. The Gramophone Company gave the region over to their Mumbai (Bombay) branch, and had a presence in shops by 1926, with a profitable business selling mostly Indian records. In early 1928, they shifted focus to recording the music of the region, and in March of that year they sent Zanzibari singer Siti binti Saad and the musicians in her troupe to record in Mumbai, where they cut the equivalent of 49 discs. Copies were pressed in India at the Gramophone pressing plant. Siti became a star, and the company ended up selling nearly 41,000 copies of those discs. That must have been considered superb (though all are exceedingly rare, today). So, the company continued to record an additional 80 or so discs by Zanzibari performers across two more sessions – another in March 1929, and one in April 1930 – all made by company engineers that were based in India at that time, like Robert Beckett and Arthur Twine.

Nestled within that research is enough data to keep most readers occupied and searching for weeks, if not months. Ward’s posts are like deep crates, full of overlooked history, odd details, and sonic clues that spiral into whole worlds. What begins as a rundown of records turns into a story about movement, colonial trade routes, and local voices breaking through. It’s dusty work, and it hits hard.

As always, Ward includes downloadable examples drawn from his collection. We’re linking to one below, but we encourage you to visit his original post for context and more recordings. It’s a 1929 record made in Madagascar by Odeon Records engineer Willi Schkölziger.

Troupe Renaissance – Rada Midona ny Atsimo

As an example of Ward’s deep knowledge on the era, he notes that this occurred at “roughly the same time that … Columbia engineer Willy Starkmann was in Antananarivo. Did they cross paths? The rivals must have been neck and neck.”

Visit Excavated Shellac for a trove of otherwise unattainable knowledge and music.