| abstract
| - Open Journal Systems. 2012. Open Journal Systems. Public Knowledge Project. (WUaS's wiki, information technologies and criteria for this - informed by the WUaS academic journal subject matter - are developing, since you can already publish your article at ).
- "World Music" has sometimes been criticised as a definition so vague as to be meaningless, or attacked by conservative commentators as the expression of a Western liberal tendency to idealise exotic traditions while undervaluing or ignoring its own cultural (or musical) heritage. Whatever the rights and wrongs of these arguments, it is certain that John Peel made his listeners aware of various kinds of world music from the beginning of his UK broadcasting career. In 1967 Indian classical music was fashionable due to George Harrison's use of the sitar on some Beatles tracks, so Peel responded by occasionally playing tracks by Ravi Shankar on his Perfumed Garden show on Radio London. When he was hosting Top Gear on BBC Radio 1 he featured sessions by Indian classical musicians Vilayat Khan and Imrat Khan, despite the fact that their music was radically different from anything else heard on the station. Night Ride owed its unique format to the existence of a large collection of non-Western music in the BBC Sound Archives. Some of these "Archive Things", as Peel called them, were included in every edition of the programme. They appealed to the late-sixties hippy taste for exotic and mysterious sounds and often blended surprisingly well with both the acoustic folk and experimental avant-garde music also featured on Night Ride. After the "son of Night Ride", the "nameless" Wednesday evening John Peel show, was taken off the air in autumn 1969, it was no longer possible for Peel to play so many exotic pieces of music within the more conventional framework of Top Gear. Yet as the sixties ended, the influence of non-European musics on artists who did sessions for Peel's shows continued. Not only the early Incredible String Band but other hippy-era groups like Quintessence and the Third Ear Band were inspired by Indian and other Asian musics. At the same time, the American Black Power movement prompted an interest in African music, and in London a number of African bands emerged.The most successful of these was Osibisa, founded by three Ghanaian highlife musicians with the addition of several West Indians; they did three Peel sessions between 1970 and 1972 and enjoyed popularity in the 1970s with their albums and energetic live performances. Gaspar Lawal also recorded a session that was broadcast on 28 August 1971 on Viv Stanshall's Radio Flashes while Peel was on holiday. In July 1973, there were debut sessions from Africa artists Oseni, Bongos & The Groovies, the Steve Rhodes Singers, and Fela Kuti. The DJ would later identify a single found in John Peel's Record Box, 'Tickey Dopies' by Sipho Bhengu, as the first African record he played on the radio, "back in 1971".[2]. When he played it on 29 September 1978 he said this was given to him by Jill Furmanovsky. In 1992 in his Little Richard Cover Search he came across two copies of Brother Blue by Onzhet Hetulate, a “25 year old” single from South Africa on Tops Records. He gave one to Andy Kershaw.
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