Miriam Makeba

Miriam Makeba’s commanding voice and inventive takes on R&B and jazz offered a powerful antidote to the gnawing effects of apartheid rule in her native South Africa during her heyday in the ’60s. Makeba’s best-known hits—including 1967’s funky “Pata Pata” and her multiple adaptations of the tongue-clicking, Xhosa-language folk song “The Click Song (Qongqothwane)”—hipped Western audiences to African languages and styles, laying the groundwork for future developments in world music. Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born in 1932 in a township near Johannesburg. She had a difficult upbringing, but she found a creative outlet by singing in church choirs and listening to her brother’s Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald records. In the ’50s, her work with various jazz groups and prominent roles in theatre performances helped get her a ticket to New York, where over the next decade she won over American audiences with a string of artfully arranged folk and soul releases—including the Grammy-winning 1965 album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba, recorded with her mentor Harry Belafonte. Makeba faced major setbacks in the late ’60s and ’70s due to her increasing outspokenness as a civil rights activist. But she kept recording and touring, remaining a tireless musical force right up until her death in 2008.