In the first intermittent Friday Fela since our summer series, we discuss one of the legend’s most famous songs.
Fela Kuti released ‘Lady’ on one of his many two-track albums, 1972’s Shakara. It was a comparatively slow year after five albums in 1971.
Questlove, the drummer-director-author-music historian extraordinaire, said of drummer Tony Allen’s playing, “It’s very danceable, yet a lot of his emphasis is never on the straight One. It’s never straight ahead” (Finding Fela, 2014).
Allen spoke about later collaborators in the west finding it difficult to hear where the One was in his drumming. “They can be confused,” he said. “I always say: ‘It’s there!’ It’s just a question of it could be on my kick or it could be on my snare. That can be considered a problem with most of the musicians.”
He played the kick (bass) drum on the One on many of Fela’s songs, as Alexander Stewart noted in his fantastic essay, “Make It Funky: Fela Kuti, James Brown and the Invention of Afrobeat”. On ‘Lady’, the emphasis on the first beat comes largely from the bass and guitars. Allen’s drums are mixed so that the hi-hat is the main element.
It was only the previous year when Fela and Brown had both started using two polyrhythmic guitars. The bass and pair of guitars, as in much of Fela’s music, stick to the same parts through the vast majority of ‘Lady’. Fela had quickly found that such arrangements could form a foundation for his music.
Allen’s fidgety hi-hat give the song momentum through the repetition and instrumental opening, which lasts six minutes. During the saxophone solo, Allen’s snare fills from 4:43 and 4:56 give the sax’s bluesy phrases more urgency.
Fela starts his vocal with percussive “Ha-ha”s. “If you call am woman, African woman no go ’gree / She go say, ‘I be lady-oh’”. The lyrics are generally seen as sexist, though it’s not entirely clear if Fela is supportive of the “African woman”’s tendency to sit down before men, take a piece of meat before men, and dare to claim equality.
‘Lady’ is another example of Fela’s unique sense of vowel sounds and his many catchy phrases, right down to those “Ha-ha”s. He extends some vowels: “She go saaaaay-ay” and sharpens others: “She go say, ‘Market woman na woman’”.
It’s variety in the vocal and musical arrangement that keeps the song interesting throughout its near-14 minutes. In the instrumental closing, the comparatively sombre keyboard chords add a new mood, and in the final minute the horns and keyboard dance in each other’s gaps, for yet another polyrhythmic pairing.
‘Lady’ is one of Fela’s most enduring songs, and has been covered at multiple Felabration events.
Top image from Bandcamp.