This is the ninth edition of Honky-Tonk Weekly, a weekly(ish) column here at the Tropical Depression Substack. You can read previous editions here. Every week, I will listen to and share a country song and write whatever comes to mind. Listen along! This week, nous changeons le monde avec Jess Sah Bi and Peter One.
Maybe this is a stretch for “Honky-Tonk Weekly” but I’ve been listening to this with my son as he falls asleep and I think it fits here. Also, this settles so snugly into my vibe that I will take it as a point of personal privilege: Americana twang channeled into the tropical diaspora. Yes, please.
Peter One was a college student at the University of Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire in 1979 when he was introduced to Jess Sah Bi, another musician who shared an interest in Western folk and country music. The two formed a band, with a natural chemistry singing together and a distinctive vision of folk music as a boundless form.
They sang in French, English, and Guoro, the Mande tribal language that they shared. They each came from small towns, and each had distinctive memories of their mothers singing traditional and ceremonial songs. But they were also energized by the metropolitan excitement of Abidjan, an increasingly cosmopolitan urban center. And by the sounds, on the radio, that they were hearing from afar. The twang and jangle of American and English folk music—their melodies, and their lyrics in a third language Jess and Peter learned in school: It seemed to find a groove for them in their home in Côte d’Ivoire. They were more than 5,000 miles from Nashville. But it fit, somehow.
They heard Dolly Parton on the radio, they played Cat Stevens records, they read music magazines with suggestions to hunt for more. They dug through the crates at Le Studio 33 and Dicotheque de L’Hotel Ivoir, record stores in downtown Abidjan.
When they played together, their blend of influences and interests—Simon and Garfunkle, Don Williams, Kenny Rogers, Afropop, traditional Ivorian folk songs, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Creedence Clearwater Revival—found a natural ease. Their music can sound like ’70s Texas country at times, only with a psychedelic veneer, and more buoyant, more joyful. The Flatlanders teleported to the beach? The sonic tropes of Western films add a dusty, spacious quality to what is still distinctly West African music.
“This was country music made in the Ivory Coast,” Jess said in a later interview. “We knew we couldn’t do it just like they do it in the U.S.”
The result was not country music, exactly. (I’m not sure if this is true, but one recent story on Peter suggests that it was Ivorian journalists who called their music “country,” and at that point the pair just ran with that.) But their music often had a country feel—Americana refracted from a distance. There is a wide-open patience in their cadence that evokes languid cowboy music. The jangly riffs and rich harmonies1 are so breezily ethereal (my son smiles and snuggles as he falls asleep); the steel guitar sounds are cozily at home.2 The harmonica wailing, as if soundtracking a gunslinger duel, is satisfyingly over the top.
Their debut album, Our Garden Needs Its Flowers, recorded in 1985, is a small masterpiece. About half an hour long, with just the right amount of magic. It is both familiar and unplaceable, folk-rock infused with African modernism, still rooted in hometown traditions and tunes they learned in their mother’s laps. I want to take a stroll in the valley it conjures.
“Solution,” our featured song this week, is my son’s favorite on the record and probably the most countryfied. Slinky and lush, it is mournfully hopeful, a lullaby drifting through the clouds.
Like a number of their songs, it has a social justice bent (“Il faut changer le monde,” the song begins—we must change the world). But it is too gentle to be anthemic. There is a hushed sweetness to their music. The revolution will have good vibrations.
The protest song “Apartheid” also has a good case to be the album’s best, its country flourishes veering almost into new wave pop. Sunny and irresistible. The groovy unity singalong “African Chant,” with harmonica once again making a wild cameo, was later used by the BBC as theme music the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison. What a world. I’ll also recommend the dreamy “Clipo Clipo.” The album is only eight songs but it feels like a healthy journey, skipping easily between three languages and splicing Ivorian traditions with modern sounds. “Katin” has an Afrobeat pulse that evokes the disco that was popular in the area at the time; the title track could pass for a Texas ballad, tumbleweeds lolling through the luscious harmonies. In this mix, the earthy motifs of country music wind up feeling otherworldly.
A brief diversion here on lucky accidents. Don Williams became a major star in West Africa, according to Jess, “because some radio host played his records every morning.” Maybe it was more complicated than that, but let’s just say that a DJ at the national radio station—the only station they could get—could play whatever he felt like, and he just happened to love Don Williams. Even if the big stuff is usually structural, sometimes history takes funny little turns on idiosyncrasies.
Williams’ sound clearly made an impression on Jess and Peter, though their initial approach as a duo probably had more in common with Simon & Garfunkle.
“We started playing acoustic guitars and singing very simple melodies, like we sing in the village,” Jess explained later. “But our style was kind of different. With our style, people thought about country music. So we had to add more country music instruments to get more real country. … We have some musicians back home who listened to the sound. We asked questions, ‘What instruments to play?’ We found out and did it.”
I love this detail: I’ve been listening to this album for months, assuming that I was hearing steel guitar here and there. Apparently not. “Use the bottle,” they were told. “Electric guitar with the bottle on the finger to make that sound.”
They spent two months working on Our Garden Needs Its Flowers with a band of session musicians (who later became their touring band) at JBZ Recording Studio in Abidjan.3
Folk-rock and country were not fashionable in Abidjan when Peter and Jess formed their group, but that may have been changing by the time their album was released, as students became interested in Western protest music. In any case, something about the album struck a chord, and Our Garden Needs Its Flowers was a hit.
Jess and Peter already had a strong local presence as popular radio and television performers, but after the success of the album, Jess and Peter became one of the biggest bands in West Africa. They toured throughout the area, playing soccer-stadium-sized crowds throughout Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Togo.
They continued as a successful touring act through the 1980s. There was a followup album in 1987, Spirit 9, that unfortunately has not been reissued. It’s not entirely clear to me what stopped their run as a band, but by the 1990s, Peter became concerned about the political situation in Côte d’Ivoire, and he left for the U.S. in 1995, eventually settling in Nashville. In 1996, Jess also emigrated to the U.S., eventually winding up in San Francisco.
Our Garden Needs Its Flowers went out of print and at least stateside, became a coveted rarity for collectors (later there were crappy bootlegs floating around and low-quality uploads onto Youtube, etc.). In 2018, the Los Angeles-based Awesome Tapes From Africa reissued the album. It still sounds fresh—a jolt of tropical bliss, cowboys lost in the cosmos.
With the release of the album, the pair began touring again around the U.S.
“African people playing country music in the United States,” Jess told one reporter. “That’s something funny! African country music before a Caucasian audience that knows country. Different styles, different things. Life is more interesting. Our voice carries very loud!”
Notes and marginalia:
Peter is still based in Nashville, where he still works in nursing (the career path he took on not long after coming to the U.S.) and continues to play music. Before the re-release of Our Garden Needs Its Flowers, he had a home studio set up and kept making several albums worth of unreleased songs, but his music career had basically stalled out in obscurity until Awesome Tapes From Africa approached him in 2018. It was a nursing job that brought him to Nashville in 2013.
“When I first came [to Nashville], I tried to meet people and get connected with musicians, but it didn’t work,” Peter told the Nashville Scene in 2018. “People are doing this for fun, for one thing, but sometimes they look at me like it’s strange — you know, an African talking about country music.”
Peter has a new solo record coming out in May. Here’s a single from the album; here’s another, this one with Allison Russell.
Jess is still in San Francisco as far as I know, where I believe he teaches African music styles to children and likewise continues to play music of his own. Here’s a solo album he released in 2019.
Jess is also a political cartoonist. From the liner notes to the re-release: “He became the first political cartoonist in the Ivory Coast and went on to draw for more than 30 newspapers and magazines across West Africa and France.” He has done some cartoons in San Francisco publications as well, and also dabbles in claymation.
Not sure how much it’s happened since their big national tour for the album, but it seems like they continue to sporadically play together; they were on the festival circuit as recently as 2019. And they’ve mentioned doing a new album together, though I don’t know whether that’s still in the works or not.
Peter One was born Pierre-Evrard Tra. He got his stage name via an English teacher who called him that to distinguish between him and and another Pierre in the class.
When he was a child, there was only one radio station in his town, which played music from all over the world. American music was popular, mostly pop and soul. In a 2019 interview with WPLN, Peter reminisced about hearing being wowed the first time he heard “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkle, when he was around 12 or 13: “I don’t know why. I don’t understand the lyrics. I don’t know how to play that. But it really touches my soul.”
There is a kind of postmodern tickle to hear an exquisite 1985 African band so clearly influenced by Paul Simon, so adept and joyful at pulling what they needed from faraway sounds to reimagine the boundaries of the music they made at home. What is culture? History’s little jokes, and fusion, all the way down.
I had fun reading/hearing their perspectives on country music. Country and folk weren’t often played on the radio, Peter said in an interview with OkayAfrica: “But every time I had the opportunity to hear some, it would ring the bell in me even though I could not understand the meaning of the songs. So much that when I started learning guitar I was first interested in learning this style of music.” Interestingly, he said in another interview that their main reference points in country before 1985 were Don Williams and Kenny Rogers, who got radio play (“the only country musicians we knew about”). It seems like they started digging deep and really learning about the genre when other people told them they sounded a little country.
A good deal of African protest music at the time was rooted in reggae. Here’s Peter on their different path: “My songs are not just for protest. They are more to bring people together beyond races, religions and nationalities. What music can better serve that purpose? Country and folk with the richness of the sounds are really the best fit to bring such harmony in society.”
And here’s Peter on their choices for language in their songs: “Songs that address international issues [like race and economy] are written in French or English. On the other hand I'd rather express my feelings for the pretty girl around the corner in words that make full sense to her.”
Here’s a nice 2019 video from BRIC TV out of Brooklyn on the pair—they’ve still got it!
There is something about their instincts that remind me a little of the Byrds, another band that found their best groove with country sounds. Honestly I think I treasure Our Garden Needs Its Flowers at least as much as Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
Not actually steel guitar! See below.
The studio was run by French-Ivorian producer Jacques Bizollon from 1981 to 2018 and recorded Ivorian reggae singer Alpha Blondy, Ghanaian singer-songwriter Pat Thomas, Les Ambassadeurs with Salif Keita from Mali, and others who made a splash on the world music scene. All of the session musicians on Our Garden Needs Its Flowers were African, most Ivorian—including N’Guessan Santa, who had a long career as an accomplished arranger and guitarist in his own right.