In the mid-1800s, they were known also as 'singsong houses,' and the courtesans were actually master musicians.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My mother was a singer, and both of her sisters were singers. There was always music around.
Since the days of slavery, if you were a good singer or dancer, it was your job to perform for the master after dinner.
My father was very interested in music, and when he and his brothers were young, they had a singing group that used to open for Sam Cooke. There was always music in our house, but there wasn't much art around.
My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.
There were bars that began to have acoustic musicians play, it was 1970: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, America, The Eagles, all that kind of stuff was popular. It was very easy for me to just kind of move in and be noticed.
I remember singing around the house to records that were playing. All kinds of music. And the great James Cleveland was often in our house, and I grew up with his sound as well.
Both my grandfathers and my mother's brother were musicians.
Artists were nurtured back in the '70s. Their music was developed by the record companies.
I grew up in such a musical family, and my dad was the first chair in the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, and my mom was a piano teacher and a painter, so it was kind of a creative environment, and it was kind of in my DNA.
My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know.