Did you know that one of the founding members of the Four Tops was of Ethiopian extraction? He definitely looks like it too, though his wikipedia page claims Bangladeshi ancestry, too. As someone of Ethiopian descent active in Motown's Four Tops, who are best known for songs such as "I Can't Help Myself" and "Bernadette," Fakir was likely one of the few Ethiopian-Americans in Detroit, since large-scale Ethiopian immigration to the US does not predate the fall of Haile Selassie's monarchy and decades of civil war, totalitarian rule, and other conflicts and disasters in the Horn of Africa. Oh well, what I would like to know is the ethnic origins of other famous Motown-era African-Americans...it definitely shows the impact of black immigration in African-America prior to the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965, which challenged racist restrictions in immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America (though, non-European immigrants from the Anglophone West Indies, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans entered the US for varying reasons prior to the cessation of racist, exclusionary immigration laws, which must be placed in a broader context of the Civil Rights Movement). Anyway, enjoy "
I Can't Help Myself" which is one of their best songs. "I can't help myself, I love you and nobody else!"
No comments:
Post a Comment