Lucky Dube ADD

Lucky Dube (and “Lucky” is his real name) was born August 3,1964 in the rural area of Ermelo, South, Africa, about 100 miles east of Johannesburg. Growing up desperately poor, with an absent father and a mother who had to go to Johannesburg to find work, Lucky was largely raised by his grandmother and began working as early as age five. Though starting school late, he became an apt student with a love of music from an early age playing in a rock band in high school. By age 16, he had begun performing music professionally, playing mainly the Zulu pop style of mbaqanga, scoring at hit with a tune called “Mama.” At the instigation of his manager/producer Richard Siluma, who was also his cousin, Lucky began performing reggae songs in his concerts which generated a great response. In 1985, against the wishes of his record company and even his own uncertainty, Lucky recorded a reggae EP, Rastas Never Die.

Despite the limited success of that EP, he took the budget for his next mbaqanga album and recorded Slave, a full reggae album which became South Africa’s all-time best-selling album. The title track, though ostensibly about alcohol addiction, resonated on another level to people suffering under apartheid. Soon Lucky was performing and become a star across Africa and then Europe. With the release of Slave by Shanachie in the United States in 1988, Lucky embarked on a massive coast-to-coast tour of the States, thrilling audiences with his fourteen-piece band and high-energy performances lasting two hours or more. He remarked that in Africa people would riot if he only performed two hours. This was the sort of reggae concert experience people had been longing for since the passing of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Lucky always made sure to include a distinctive South African flavor via mbaqanga-style organ and timbale riffs in his version of classic roots reggae.

In ensuing years, Lucky Dube went from strength to strength with a series of powerful albums and incessant touring all over the world. A hallmark of Lucky as an artist and a person was his humility as well as his sense of humanity transcended superficial divisions of race, culture, or ideology. He saw music as a force to bring people together and he succeeded in doing just that throughout his extraordinary rise from abject poverty to international fame.

Lucky continued to release acclaimed albums and make celebrated tours until he was tragically murdered in a failed car-jacking in a suburb of Johannesburg in 2007; he was only 43.