On a recent night at the New York music venue Webster Hall, a white-haired man in his 60s with an acoustic guitar walked gracefully onto the stage, sat on a stool and began to speak. “I’m from Ivory Coast,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper. “I came a long way to America to play music for you – and to tell you my story.”
For the next 45 minutes, he offered slices of it, interspersed with cascading ballads that mix African cadences with strains of American country and folk music sung at a hushed volume. Despite the intimate nature of the performance – not to mention the fact that few in the crowd, who had come to see the headliners, the Walkmen, had any idea who the singer was – the audience remained rapt. Having spent an hour earlier in the evening with the man born Pierre-Evrard Tra, who performs as Peter One, I understood what transfixed them. His story involves tales of economic collapse, political corruption and mass violence in his home country, as well as resourcefulness, focus and courage on his part in coming to America. It’s the kind of positive immigrant story that fulfills the promise to new arrivals the US often only pays lip service to. “I felt fear when I came here,” One said when we spoke backstage. “But I was determined. This was my dream.”
Now, it’s coming true – if at a decades-long delay. This week, Verve Records will release One’s first album in nearly 40 years, titled Come Back to Me. It’s also the 67-year-old’s debut on a major label. In order to get time off from his day job to play shows like the New York gig, however, he had to reveal to his co-workers for the first time his backstory of having been a popular musician in Ivory Coast in the 80s and 90s. For much of the last 30 years, One has worked in a nursing home in Tennessee without once mentioning his former life. “Why would I tell them?” he said. “They would just say, ‘If you’re a star what are you doing here?’”
One’s modest demeanor would hardly tip off his eventful past. He grew up in the tiny rural town of Bonoua, 30 minutes from Ivory Coast’s capitol of Abidjan. His parents divorced when he was three, leaving him to be raised by his uncle who worked as a farmer for a French pineapple company whose factory employed almost everyone in town. Though the area had just one radio station, it played all kind of music, including pop, jazz and soul from Europe, America and all over Africa. Among the many songs he heard on the station, one stood above the rest – The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel. Later, the song would provide a core part of his musical blueprint. “It touched me so deeply,” he said. “I used to call that ‘green music’, because it reminds me of the trees in the country. The voices are natural. The guitars are acoustic. It’s pure.”
At the same time, One was taken with the lilting ballads of African musicians like GG Vickey of Benin and Eboa Lotin of Cameroon. At 17, he started playing guitar and writing songs that sifted aspects of African balladry with influences from American acts like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young as well as various US country artists he heard on a cassette compilation made by a friend. While attending the University of Abidjan, he met another musician, Jess Sah Bi, who knew people at the national TV station, which led to an opportunity for them to perform as a duo on the air. Their appearances resulted in the release of an album, Our Garden Needs Its Flowers, issued in Africa to local acclaim in 1985. To broaden the appeal of the music, they sang the lyrics in three languages: English, French (the country’s official tongue) and Gouro (a local parlance).
The album sold well enough in western Africa to allow the pair to tour in nearby countries like Togo and Burkina Faso. The money their music generated came in handy because, that same year, the pineapple factory that supported the town where One grew up closed, a disaster for the entire area. The songs on the Flowers album didn’t address economic issues but some, like Solution and African Chant, spoke of topics like tolerance and peace. “My goal is to bring people together,” the singer said. “We need justice. We need equality. We need to see that we are all the same.”
Another song, Apartheid, addressed the situation in South Africa at the time. “Between 1980 and 1990, everybody in Africa was talking about it,” he said. In 1990, when Nelson Mandela was finally freed from prison, the BBC played African Chant during its coverage of the event. Even so, One couldn’t make a living from music, so he supported himself as a history teacher. On his first day on the job, the faculty went on what became a successful strike, giving One the idea to try to start a musician’s union. “I was looking at the musicians who were famous at the time and most were desperate financially,” he said.
To help, he began to study copyright law and to try to figure out ways to help crack down on the widespread black market sales of local music. In 1990, he convinced the country’s musicians that they needed to organize, but soon after, the businesspeople involved in the union “started taking advantage of the situation. The president was corrupt,” he said.
One became so frustrated that, in 1993, he inaugurated a second union but the government wouldn’t recognize it. “They blocked the money that should be given to us,” he said.
At the same time, the country was going through a wrenching power struggle between two political parties. “There were always demonstrations in the streets,” One said. “They started having assassinations and a lot of imprisonments, sometimes just for speaking out. Some of my fellow teachers went to jail. Some lost their jobs, and some were killed.”
The result cratered the economy. By 1994, the local currency had lost half its value. All of those factors prompted One to finally leave the country in 1995. At first, his goal in coming to America was simply to buy musical equipment and learn more about the music business before moving back home. Once he landed in New York, however, he found that amassing money and experience in a new place was harder than he thought. More, he found the city overwhelming, so after working for a few months as a messenger and, later, a security guard, he sought out a smaller city. For a while, he taught French in Wilmington, Delaware, but he found the students spoiled and unruly. His desire to find a steady job with more flexible hours led him to pursue a career in nursing which led to a position in that field in Nashville. Its reputation as “Music City” struck him as pre-ordained. “I thought, ‘if God has sent me here, he has a plan for me,’” One said.
Unfortunately, the plan wasn’t prompt. For the next 25 years, One relied on nursing to support his family, which now included two children. Every now and then he wrote songs; twice he tried to record a few with local musicians but he found the players rigid and naive about his style. “They’d say I was doing reggae music or Afrobeat,” he said with a laugh.
Things only began to change for him after an opportunity came out of the blue. In 2018, the head of tiny American label called Awesome Tapes from Africa contacted One and Jess Sah Bi to negotiate a deal to release their 33-year-old album in the US for the first time. The result drew great reviews in Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, leading to One’s current contract with Verve. His new album has more instrumentation than his earlier work, but the sound remains spare and clean, the better to highlight One’s plaintive voice and dancing melodies. The lyrics which, again, he sings in three languages, address everything from love to hardship to domestic violence. The last subject reflects his own experience at the hands of his wife. “They don’t talk about domestic violence against men,” One said. “But it happens.” (He and his wife have since divorced. Their children are now in college.)
Another song on the album, Birds Go Home to Die, tells the true story of friend and fellow Ivory Coast emigre to America who returned to that country and wound up dying there. “I told him not to go,” the singer said. “He didn’t listen.”
To the singer, the root cause of the issues that still roil the country of his birth can be traced to colonization. “The French still have too strong a grip on the economy and the politics,” he said. “They put people in power who they can control. That’s what brings all these troubles.”
Despite such viewpoints, One doesn’t consider himself a political person. Music remains his muse and now, he hopes, his living. For the moment he still has to work some hours at the nursing home to get by but the spirit he brings to it has changed. “To make music again is making me feel younger,” he said. “I had this dream and I’ve kept it all this time. Now, it’s starting to come true.”
Peter One opens for Gipsy Kings at Royal Albert Hall on 15 May and plays his own show at Third Man Blue Basement on 16 May
