Reminiscing the Ethiopian James Brown: Alemayehu Eshete's Artistic Legacy

Description

This book attempts to portray the Ethiopian iconic musician Alemayehu Eshete, whose artistic career started in the early 1960s and continued for decades until his demise in 2021 at the age of ca. 80. His musical legacy, principally his more than 400 timeless tunes deriving from the 1960s and 1970s, reflect the unique styles and genres of the legendary ‘Godfather of Soul’, James Brown, the reason why it makes sense to designate him as the ‘Ethiopian James Brown’. During his early adult life, Alemayehu was also nicknamed as ‘The Abyssinian Elvis’, whose great fan he was imitating his fashion, style, watching his plentiful movies and listening to his greatest songs.With his longstanding artistic experience, performance style, entertainment skills, and stage appearance, Alemayehu served as a catalyst for change by contributing his level best towards advancing the popular music landscape of Ethiopia.This book provides the reader with a detailed biographic data of Alemayehu Eshete followed by thorough analysis and discussion of his abundant songs that have without a doubt stood the test of time.By writing this book I sought to send out a signal about the importance to pay homage to Ethiopian veteran artists during their lifetime since the culture of appreciating people for their contributions has not often been taken seriously in Ethiopia until recently. Alemayehu was very pleased about the outcome of my research and happy to witness that a large portion of this book was made available from 2018-2021 on academia.edu. Accordingly, the contents were divided into several short articles for readers to access for free. However, now the complete work is presented here.