Across the Ocean, a Song Brings Sisters Back Together
On two different sides of the vast expanse that is the Atlantic Ocean, two women had long lived their lives without the faintest knowledge of the other’s existence. But, even though they didn’t know it, they were deeply, profoundly connected. Both of these women — one in the U.S. state of Georgia and the other in the African country of Sierra Leone — had grown up singing a specific song, passed onto them by generations of their elders. It was this song, ultimately, that slowly but surely managed to pull these women together. Even though thousands of miles separated them, the song helped them find each other.
The start of the story
This is a long story, with plenty of twists and turns, and it takes us back to 1933. That was the year that Lorenzo Dow Turner, a prominent scholar, met an old woman called Amelia Dawley, who lived in a remote community by the sea in Savannah, Georgia. Dawley was a member of the Gullah Geechee community.
The Gullah Geechee are descended from African people brought to the coasts of Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina as slaves. They speak in a unique tongue, which is where Turner’s interests in the group mainly lay. He studied the Gullah Geechee dialect extensively, becoming a leading academic authority on it.
A Mende song
Turner had brought some recording equipment along with him when he met Dawley, which meant he was able to record her singing. The song she performed was enigmatic, its origins and meaning unknown to Dawley. It was something she’d learned from her older family members, who, in turn, had learned it from their elders.
Eventually someone who heard Turner’s recording was able to offer some insight. This person was from Sierra Leone, and he recognized the language featured in its lyrics. It was the Mende tongue, which is widely spoken in parts of Sierra Leone.
The song finds a new fan
This was a great leap forward for Turner: it meant he was later able to translate the words of the song into English. He included them in his book Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, which was published in 1949. Now, we need to fast- forward a few decades, to when Turner’s research was discovered by an anthropologist named Joseph Opala, who himself became fascinated by the song.
Opala actually went so far as to travel to Sierra Leone itself. Journeying through the country alongside an ethnomusicologist called Cynthia Schmidt and a translator called Tazieff Koroma, he was determined to learn more about where Dawley’s song had come from.
A breakthrough
The investigation in Sierra Leone, as you might expect, was a pretty difficult task. The group traveled around for a long time, with solid answers proving tough to come by. But the tide started to turn when Schmidt found herself in a village called Senehun Ngola. In this remote community things began to click into place.
Schmidt met a woman who sang a song that was remarkably similar to the one Dawley had been singing back in Georgia. “[Her] grandmother had taught her the song,” Schmidt explained in an article published by Smithsonian magazine, “and she had kept it alive by changing the words for other occasions.”