Miriam Makeba

Born in Johannesburg in 1932 to Swazi and Xhosa parents, Zenzile Miriam Makeba sang professionally through the 1950s with the Manhattan Brothers and the Skylarks, blending jazz, traditional African melodies, and Western pop. A small role in the 1959 anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa brought international attention and a meeting with Harry Belafonte in London, who became her mentor. She moved to New York, recorded her first solo album in 1960, and was blocked from returning home for her mother's funeral that same year. She won a Grammy with Belafonte in 1965 and released "Pata Pata" in 1967, but her 1968 marriage to Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael cost her American support and her visa, forcing the couple to Guinea. She spent the next two decades performing across Africa, recording the Soweto uprising elegy "Soweto Blues" in 1977, and returned to South Africa only after apartheid fell in 1990. She died of a heart attack during a concert in Italy in 2008, at seventy-six.