South African musical legend Miriam Makeba dies

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081110/ap_on_en_mu/eu_obit_makeba;_ylt=AvlJYc7Aewt8k8y9tIzQK3DLLJ94
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Miriam Makeba, the South African singer who wooed the world with her sultry voice but was banned from her own country for more than 30 years under apartheid, died after a concert in Italy. She was 76.

In her dazzling career, Makeba performed with musical legends from around the world — jazz maestros Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon — and sang for world leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela.

"Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us," Mandela said in a statement.

He said it was "fitting" that her last moments were spent on stage.

The Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno, near the southern city of Naples, said Makeba died early Monday of a heart attack.


Rest in peace lady with that lovely haunting voice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc61z9IFu4

And from what she was telling me a few months ago, this wasn't unexpected by people who knew her. She had fallen into a very serious drinking problem, and at her age that's hard on the body.

She had both a wonderful life and one of the most difficult and painful lives imaginable.

There is a moment in the film, "Come Back, Africa," perhaps the strangest and most wonderful in all of African cinema, in which this supposedly fictional film wanders into a Johannesburg shebeen (illegal black bar), and there, the cream of the crop of South African writers happen to be sitting around talking. Writer Can Themba spontaneously gives this amazing monologue about South Africa, and then turns to a young woman and says something like, won't you sing us a song, Miriam? And it's an incredibly young Miriam Makeba who then just rocks the movie. That's how she was discovered by the "outside" world. When she attended a film festival overseas, the South African government revoked her passport and she was left stateless for the next several decades.

RIP Miriam, your music will live on to inspire.

Sad day.