A Case Study of Highlife Music - Analytical Approaches to World Music

The roots of Highlife music lies therefore, in the social dance music of severalcultures in the West African sub-region before European contact, as well as earlysyncretic musical forms such as Gumbey music in Sierra Leone, Adaha Kokomba orKokoma in Ghana and Nigeria, Asiko and Itembe music in Eastern Nigeria and Agidigbomusic in Western Nigeria. These forms which usually combined traditional instrumentswith Western musical instruments like the acoustic guitar, banjo, accordion andharmonica were subsumed under an amorphous label of ‘palm wine’ music because oftheir predominance in palm wine (or tombo in local parlance) bars during their hey days.They also bear the double toga of being part of the developmental processes in thecrystallization of the Highlife form and as well representing what can be described as a‘poor man’s’ version of Highlife music. These various palm wine styles went into thetapestry of what later became known by the generic name of Highlife. Consequently, thissubtlety of interaction between European/American and ethnic-based recreational musictranslated into ethnic and regional styles of Highlife music which necessarily existwithin a stylistic and sociological framework of what may be termed as ‘Nigerian’ orGhanaian ‘Highlife’ and their ethnic variations.By around 1950, recognizable stylistic patterns of Highlife music had emerged inNigeria and Ghana. This was most significantly through the music and performancetours of Emmanuel Tettey Mensah (E.T. Mensah) and the Tempos band of Ghana, whotoured the West African region extensively from the 1950s. Although Mensah helped tospread Highlife music through his West African tours, it was in Nigeria the country hevisited most that Highlife music caught on most significantly outside its home base inGhana. Mensah is generally believed to have bequeathed to Nigeria, the dance bandHighlife incarnation so recognized today (see Rhodes, 1998:6 Aig-Imokhuede 1975:214-215 and Collin, 1992:24-25) .In his own reaction to the claim that he is the originator of Highlife, E.T Mensahhumbly submits that no one can really lay claim to Highlife’s creation because it hasalways been there entrenched in West African culture and that what he did, was to giveHighlife world acceptance (Mensah, in Okwechime, 1984:13). While it is plausible thatthe nomenclature Highlife, predates E.T. Mensah and the Tempos Band of Ghana, E.T.Mensah is the man who pioneered the dance band format as a contradistinction to the big5