On the Road with Bob Holman

A griot (gree-oh) is the keeper of the West African oral tradition and the tribe's genealogy through poetic songs. Bob is invited to Gambia by his long-time friend and teacher, Papa Susso, to learn more about this musical art and see how the kora, the 21-string harp-lute is made. Bob travels up the Niger River with Papa's son, Karamo, also a griot, in search of the spirit of the African-American Beat poet, Ted Joans, who lived a buoyant life in Timbuktu in the 70s and was Bob's mentor. Along the way, Bob discovers the roots of hip-hop, rap, the blues -- all the great American musical traditions that originated in Africa. The episode concludes with a kora-guitar jam session between Karamo and Ali Farka Toure's son, Vieux.

The show continues in Timbuktu where Bob gets more insight into the dusty off-station in the middle of nowhere. Bob goes to the Timbuktu Library, with volumes from the 16th Century when the city was the center of African learning. We ourselves learn how to ride a camel and how Timbuktu got its name before we venture into the Sahara and spend an afternoon listening to the hypnotic music of the Tuaregs, the nomadic "blue people," named because their indigo-dyed clothing rubs off on their skin. Then we head south to visit the Dogons, renowned for the interplay of their culture of masks with daily life and rituals. Bob tries to get a mask ceremony to happen: he buys millet beer for the town, and we see how it is brewed.

Yiddish, which once had five daily newspapers in New York City, is now an Endangered Language. From the director of the Sholem-Aleichem House and the Yiddish storyteller, Sarat, we learn about the decline of Yiddish resulting from the rise of Hebrew as the national language of Israel. Sarat cooks us a delicious cholent, a stew combining many of the ingredients from the old countries. While in Jerusalem, we experience the musical sounds of Ladino, the Spanish Hebrew of the Sephardic Jews, which is also endangered. The poet Ronny Someck, a "true Israeli poet from Iraq," gives Bob a tour of Jaffa and tells us about the multilingual diversity that used to exist in Israel.