This is classic collection of Highlife, Palm-wine music & Juju from Nigeria & Ghana, from the 50's & 60's....
and includes unavailable tracks by Earnest Olatunde Thomas, known as Tunde Nightingale or The Western Nightingale, who was a Nigerian singer and guitarist, best known for his unique jùjú music style, following in the tradition of Tunde King... As well as legendary Afrobeat pioneer Fela Ransome Kuti's first recordings of highlife and calypso, recorded in London in 1959...

Highlife, type of West African popular music and dance that originated in Ghana in the late 19th century, later spread to western Nigeria, and flourished in both countries in the 1950s. The earliest form of highlife was performed primarily by brass bands along the Ghanaian coast. By the early 20th century these bands had incorporated a broader array of instruments (primarily of European origin), a vocal component, and stylistic elements both of local music traditions and of jazz. Highlife thus emerged as a unique synthesis of African, African American, and European musical aesthetics.

In the 1930s the popularity of highlife stretched inland and eastward along the coast, garnering an especially large following in Nigeria. There highlife experienced an important transformation: asymmetrical drum rhythms derived from traditional drumming practices of the Yoruba people were combined with syncopated (displaced-accent) guitar melodies to accompany songs sung in either Yoruba or English. By the mid-1960s, however, highlife had lost much of its audience to guitar-centred popular styles. One of these styles, a predominantly Yoruba-based outgrowth of highlife called juju, gained widespread international recognition in the 1980s and remained popular in Nigerian “hotels,” or nightclubs, into the 21st century.


Highlife music has not been a single movement, it has not been a statement of political intent, of uprising or the idealism of a particular group; no use of it to channel a particular message has subsumed its sound. No one group has made it their own, and therefore it has remained a wonderfully rare example of free spirit and expression of the human experience.

The foundations of the tradition are grounded, initially separately, in the north and south of Ghana. The sub-Saharan north has long acted as a cultural catch-all for the traffic of Western Africa at large. The Songnai and Mali empires caused ethic migration and the blurring of cultural borders in West Africa, bringing praise-singing traditions of the Frafra, Ghurunsi, and Dagomba people in the northeast together with that of the Dagara, Lobi, Wala, and Sissala in the northwest.

This spiritual identity is tempered by the osmotic folk music of the south. The music of southern Ghana seems historically to have taken a more internal and pragmatic focus; the settled Ashanti south incorporated music as a relief and pleasure in and of itself rather than as a billboard for their identity as a tribal entity. This is reflected in the simpler folk style, which has simmered into existence with a gradual influence from neighboring Benin and Tongo.

The emergence of the music that has come to be defined as “Highlife” can be traced back to the early 20th century and the international interest in Africa’s Gold Coast, as it was known. The constant influx of Europeans since the 15th century introduced the indigenous population to hymns, shanties, and marches, and as the Ashanti people organized and attempted the uprising which resulted in the War of the Golden Stool, a musical tradition was born, and the seeds of Ghana’s identity were sown.

Though the Ashanti uprising against the British was initially unsuccessful, it was their assertiveness which led to the creation of an art powerful enough to hide in plain view what it was intended to express. The Ashanti people wanted to be free and this shared objective gave rise to musical union. Traditional African instruments such as the seperewa harp-lute and the gankogul bell were combined with European harmonies and guitars as people expressed themselves through song. Perhaps, even the appearance in which the genre took its name is indicative of the cultural displacement effected upon the colonizing forces.

With the failed uprising behind them, and no opportunity for self-governance forthcoming, attention was given to social matters and the formation of strata. As it became fashionable for people to be seen in certain hotels with certain bands playing, the media and fledgling record companies attached an aspirational label to the by-then sonically defined genre. The music was not simply part of “living the highlife,” it was, in itself, Highlife. The self-confidence of bands and musicians took off and has continued for generations, allowing the evolution of the form. In the wake of the Second World War, jazz, blues, reggae, and even funk influences gave rise to acts like Osibisa, who carried Highlife beyond Africa and into the living rooms of the world and influenced the Afro-Breat...