Palm-wine music

Palm-Wine Music is a traditional West African popular music genre that developed along the coastal regions of present-day Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria in the late nineteenth century. The genre has various origins, but primarily palm-wine music ties back to native musical traditions that were introduced to imported instruments, particularly the guitar. Palm-wine music is widely regarded as the foundation of many modern-day popular music styles. It evolved among the Kru people of Liberia and Sierra Leone, who used Portuguese guitars brought by sailors, combining local melodies and rhythms with Trinidadian calypso to create a "light, easy, lilting style". It would initially work its way inland where it would adopt a more traditional style than what was played in coastal areas. It would eventually gain popularity after Sierra Leone musician Ebenezer Calendar recorded songs in the 1950s and 1960s and continues to hold a small amount of that popularity.

Palm-wine music was named after a drink, palm wine, made from the naturally fermented sap of the oil palm, which was drunk at gatherings where early African guitarists played.

Palm-wine music was born in the working-class coastal areas, particularly among dockworkers, sailors, and fishermen. This area was a major hub of the triangle trade, which brought in new European instruments. Music was performed in informal outdoor drinking clubs where palm wine was available, giving it its name. The genre was created by interactions between native West Africa, mainly on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea. Makeshift guitar performance styles spread from coastal to inland areas, where they shaped early forms of urban music. Palm-wine music has been described as one of the first forms of popular music in West Africa. Portable instruments and local string and percussion merged to create this style. It was out of this genre that the traditional two-finger plucking of a guitar came when musicians played it similarly to how they played the local lute or harp. This style was typically played in a syncopated 4/4 metre.

In the 1920s, a Kru taught Ghanaian highlife guitarist Kwame Asare (or Jacob Sam). His Kumasi Trio made their first highlife recordings for Zonophone in London in 1928. As the music spread from the coast into the hinterland, the sound of the traditional Akan harp lute seperewa was infused and this evolved into the odonson or Akan blues and was called the "Native Blues". At its peak of popularity in the 1930s, there would be about 200,000 Native Blues records sold per year before production was stopped due to World War II.