Highlife music, a living chronicle of Ghana’s heartbeat rooted in centuries of resistance a reinventing tells the story of a group of people who danced through migration, colonial rule, independence, love, hardship, and hope.
To understand the true soul of Highlife, we must take a closer look at Ghanaian traditional music which is essentially organized and performed as part of a living drama as an essential component of everyday life.
Drumming was sacred. From the talking drums to the energetic Agbadza, Adowa, Bamaya, Apatampa, Kpanlogo, Kpanaliumni, Kete, Kundum, Borborbor, Pogne, each beat carried messages, memories, and meaning.
Traditional xylophones, flutes, rattles, and layered handclaps created complex polyrhythms that echoed through towns, cities and villages. Every community had its master drummer, its storyteller, its ceremonial dancers.
There were types of music and dancing specifically made for festivals, worship as well as the various celebrated ceremonies with naming, marriage, and puberty rites being examples. There are those performed exclusively by men and women as well as a combination made up of both men and women.
These songs offered the best platform for group participation at ceremonies, be they social or solemn funeral occasions. With a single drum to provide a background of rhythmical accompaniment, a bell or hand clapping to outline the pulsation of the music.
Music accompanied birth, death, farming, war, and rainmaking. But it was not static. It evolved with the times and when the winds of colonialism began to blow, it welcomed, resisted, and reimagined the new sounds that came ashore.
By the late 1800s, the British had solidified their control over the Gold Coast. Along with European trade goods came new sounds like Christian hymns from missionaries, military brass from colonial regiments, and ballroom melodies from European settlers. These foreign rhythms floated into the ears of local musicians, many of whom worked in colonial institutions or played in church groups.
In towns like Cape Coast and Elmina—bustling with European forts and African intellectual life, students of Ghanaian decent started reading music and play the violin as well as the trumpet. But they didn’t play it the European way. They bent the notes, added syncopation, and blended in traditional drumming patterns. Something new was stirring.
The Palm-Wine Revolution soon began on the wooden stools of seaside bars, where sailors drank palm wine by the gallon. A new sound began to take shape. Palm-wine music, named after the sweet fermented drink made from palm tree sap. It grew from the conversations, celebrations, and sorrows of working-class Ghanaians. Right in the coastal settlements of the country, the genre found it’s feet.
Guitars, brought by Kru sailors from Liberia and Sierra Leone, became the backbone of this sound. Palm-wine music was raw, relatable, and real. It didn’t belong in ballrooms—it lived in the streets, on verandas, and in the souls of fishermen and laborers. But it wouldn’t stay there for long.
As the British continued to influence the social structures of the Gold Coast, they introduced formal brass bands to mark military parades and colonial ceremonies. Ghanaians, always eager to learn and adapt, mastered these instruments quickly. By the 1930s, local brass bands had sprouted in towns like Winneba, Cape Coast, and Accra.
In Accra, clubs like the Accra Club and Kingsway Club hosted elegant dances for the colonial elite. These functions featured bands playing a mix of waltz, foxtrot, and calypso. But something changed when local bands took the stage. They infused these Western styles with Ghanaian rhythms and storytelling. What emerged was a sound that made people move differently as it was festive yet familiar, foreign yet deeply Ghanaian.
The people watching from outside the gates, those who couldn’t afford the entrance fee called it the “high life.” To them, it was music for the wealthy, for those living the ‘high life.’ But as more and more locals embraced the sound, the term stuck, and the music found a home in every corner of Ghanaian society.
Highlife Music is essentially vocal. There always has to be a vocal interlude even when played with varied instruments. These songs are based on a variety of subjects: political, topical, humorous, songs about individuals, morals and death.
The tunes are often catchy and simple enough in outline to be readily grasped by the ordinary person. The cultural importance of Highlife Music is the fact that it is “inter” tribal or ethnic and and considered a national heritage.
As Calypso Music is indigenous to Trinidad and Tobago and Reggae is to Jamaica, so is Highlife Music to Ghana. By the 1920’s Highlife Music had spread throughout the southern part of Ghana and played by three main types of ensemble: brass bands, dance orchestras and guitar bands.
The Regimental Bands of the West Indian soldiers stationed on the coast during the late 19th Century inspired local brass bands. In addition to marches and western music, they played a type of music known as “Adaha”. In the 1920’s local brass bands and fife bands were established in many provincial towns.
They even influenced indigenous Akan (an ethnic group in Ghana) recreational music, which resulted in a version of brass bands known as “Konkoma” (marching groups) in the 1930’s. The type of music played by these “Konkoma” marching groups became very popular, and spread to Nigeria.
The second type of Highlife Music ensemble was the dance orchestra. The first dance orchestra, the Excelsior Orchestra, was founded in Accra in 1914. The music played was ballroom, ragtime and highlife. The group performed mostly at cinema and dance halls in Accra and Sekondi for the upper class Ghanaians who dressed in evening dress with top hats.
By the 1930’s a number of similar orchestras of almost symphonic composition but playing popular dance tunes, came into existence. Among these were the Winneba Orchestra, the Sekondi Nanshamang, the Cape Coast Sugar Babies, Professor Grave’s Orchestra, the Asante Nkramo Band, The Koforidua Casino Orchestra. There were also Teacher Lamptey’s Accra Orchestra and the Accra Rhythmic Orchestra.
The third type of Ghanaian Highlife ensemble was those that played in local drinking bars. This earlier ensemble utilized sailor’s instruments; namely the guitar, local drums, claves, castanets also known as the Akan “apreprensiwa” or the Akan hand piano.
One man, Jacob Sam, popularly known as Kwame Asare took the guitar and transformed it. With delicate fingerpicking and lyrics sung in Fante and Akan, he sang of heartbreak, poverty, gossip, and everyday life. His music, recorded as far back as the 1920s under the moniker “Sam’s Trio,” became the blueprint for a generation.
He was taught the guitar by a Kru Liberian seaman. His famous guitar style came from the two finger technique of playing the seprewa, a traditional harp-lute. Asare was trained as a goldsmith and he moved to Kumasi where he formed the Kumasi Trio.
Jacob Sam reportedly recorded the first Ghanaian highlife song known as “Yaa Amponsah”, now considered a guitar-band highlife classic, on the Zonophone Label in London in 1928 on their EZ series. Later he recorded for His Master’s Voice on their JZ series under the name of “Kwamin”.
The 1940s and 50s brought a golden glow to the budding Highlife scene. In Accra, a young saxophonist named Emmanuel Tettey Mensah populary know as E.T. Mensah rose to prominence. Along with his band, The Tempos, he created a refined, danceable version of Highlife that blended swing jazz, calypso, and traditional Ga rhythms. E.T. Mensah’s music wasn’t just entertainmen, it was a national anthem of pride and progress.
He sang of unity, independence, love, and joy. Songs like “Ghana Freedom” captured the spirit of a new nation on the rise. Across West Africa, from Nigeria to Sierra Leone, E.T. became a legend, performing for presidents and commoners alike. He wasn’t alone. Other pioneers like King Bruce, Jerry Hansen, and the Black Beats added their own flavors, creating a Highlife mosaic that celebrated Ghanaian diversity.
After the Second World War, guitar bands playing highlife music became very popular. There was now a rather bigger market for highlife music. Songs produced by musicians such as Otoo Lartey, E.K. Nyame (E.K.’S Band), Appiah Adzekum, Yebua, Kwaa Mensah, Obiba T.K. took the spotlight as they featured mandolins and guitars.
The Appiah Adzekum’s instrumental ensemble consisted of bass, treble and tenor frame drums (known also as Gombe or Gome drums), finger gong-gong, two acoustic guitars and an accordion. Kwaa Mensah in addition of all these by Appiah Adzekum added the piano.
The most popular highlife style with all these groups was the Akan “Odonson” or Ashanti Blues, Konkoma and the Ga Kolomashie. Konkoma was a local dance and drumming craze that swept the Gold Coast in the 1930’s and 40’s that evolved from the local syncopated brass band tradition.
The highlife music played by the guitar bands also became closely linked with the concert parties. The first artist to combine these two distinct forms that is highlife and stage acting or concert was E. K. Nyame. Born in 1927, E. K. Nyame, the leader of the E.K’s Band, began his career with Appiah Adjekum. He formed his concert trio in 1952 and later merged it with his guitar band and named this new group the Akan Trio.
Other concert groups that followed suite and led by Kakaiku, Kwaa Mensah, etc., were based along the coastal area of Ghana, while Kwabena Onyina and others were in Kumasi in the Ashanti Region. The concert party form was loosely woven and readily incorporated current social events, gossips, exclamations by spectators and improvisational inspirations of individual actors.
During Ghana’s cocoa boom in the 1930’s through the depression, the Second World War, the pre-independence riots in 1948, the arrest of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and the advent of Ghana’s independence, concert parties dramatized the tensions and situations of everyday life among the intermediate classes who struggled daily to provide their basic needs.
Most of the big band highlife groups of the 1950’s and 60’s such as the Stargazers, E.T. Mensah and his Tempos Band, that used western musical instruments evolved out of the dance orchestras, a product of the Second World War. Before then small swing bands were established to cater for foreign servicemen and composed of white musicians as well as Gold Coasters (Ghanaians since 1957) recruited from the local dance orchestras.
E.T. Mensah belonged to the Tempos Band, which was totally African after the foreign soldiers were demobilized and had left to their various countries. E.T. Mensah became the leader. His Trumpet fusion of swing, calypso and Afro-Cuban music with the highlife became so successful that the Tempos Band became the prototype for numerous West African Highlife Dance Bands. These included the Red Spots, The Black Beats, Ramblers, Stargazers, Broadway and the Uhuru dance bands to name but a few.
Today, Highlife still echoes in weddings, funerals, festivals, and hearts. It is not just music it is memory, identity, and pride. It reminds Ghanaians of where they’ve been and inspires them toward where they’re going. And like the palm tree whose wine nourished the early chords, Highlife music will continue to stand tall deep-rooted, graceful, and full of life.
