My research work in Ghana over the past four decades can be thought of as following three main themes, one of them being the functions of African popular music. Since the 1950s, ethno-musicological studies of African traditional music have focused on the functions of music in culture as they recognized that music and musicking permeates every aspect of traditional African life. From my own experiences in African popular music I have noted the same close utilitarian role of music in culture — very different from the music of the U.K. where I come from, where popular music is used mainly used for entertainment and classical music is an art for art’s sake. However, in Ghana I discovered that African popular music, like traditional music, has numerous other functions, such as sung philosophies, expressing proverbial wisdom, commenting on the ills and benefits of urbanization and modernization, marking out life cycle events from birth to death, articulating youth identity and reflecting changing gender norms. Popular music was also used during the independence struggle and to foster a national identity, right up to the songs being used at political rallies and to protest against corruption of the ruling elites. Nigeria’s Fela Kuti is a prominent example.

My second topic of interest is the impact of the Black Americas. From 1969 when I joined my first highlife — early style of Ghanaian popular music, a classic example can be found here — guitar band, the Jaguar Jokers, I noticed the profound impact of the music and dance of the Black Americas, as this highlife guitar band played a whole range of music styles that ranged from ragtime, tap-dancing and foxtrots, to rumbas, sambas, calypsos and soul music. Then when I formed my first band, Bokoor, in the 1970s, I used as a bass instrument what I thought was a local Ga frame-drum called the gome. I later discovered that, in fact, this was a Black Jamaican drum — goombay or gumbay — that was introduced to West Africa in 1800 by freed Maroon slaves who were settled by the British in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Likewise, I discovered from research in Cape Coast that early forms of Afro-Caribbean calypso had been introduced to Ghana, and indeed Sierra Leone and Nigeria, by thousands of English speaking Black Caribbean soldiers recruited into the British colonial army in the late 19th century. More recently, after Louis Armstrong made several trips to Ghana around the late '50s, many highlife dance musicians began to emulate his trumpet style and gravelly Satchmo voice. In short, I discovered that the two sides of the Black Atlantic had begun to reunite, at least through music, over two centuries ago. Today, this transatlantic homecoming is reflected in the youthful craze here for reggae, ragga, salsa and hip-hop.

A third theme in my music research is the importance of African popular music studies for African universities. When I was first studying at the University of Ghana at Legon between 1969 and 1972, highlife and African popular music were not being taught, as the general view then was that popular music was ephemeral, of low esteem and of no real importance to society, while its practitioners were drunkards and drop-outs. However, by the mid-1990s this had changed and I was asked to set up the very first African popular music courses at a Ghanaian university. They are still operating today with some of my students teaching these courses at the Legon campus and other Ghanaian campuses. These changing attitudes about African popular music were presented in my paper Some Reasons for Teaching African Popular Music Studies in Universities, where I discuss the gradual recognition of popular music, both among the Western and Ghanaian scholars, as a genuine voice of the people that could project ideas critical of governments as opposed to a type of mass entertainment used to divert people’s attention from the control exerted over them.

I first went to Ghana, which was then known as the British Gold Coast, in 1952, when my father joined the staff of the newly formed Philosophy Department of the University of Ghana at Legon. In 1969 I decided to do a BA degree in sociology, archaeology and political science at the University of Ghana. In the same year, through my father, I first joined a Ghanaian group called the Jaguar Jokers highlife guitar band and concert party, the concert party being a Ghanaian popular musical theatre that draws mainly on highlife. As back then in 1969 I was always holding my guitar, I was invited to join the band and so I traveled around the villages and small towns of southern Ghana with this itinerant group that consisted of highlife musicians, comedians, actors and female impersonators. From the very first tour I was immersed in a totally new musical world that ultimately led me to switch from being a social scientist to a musician.

John Collins and some Bokoor Band members at their Jamestown Accra base in 1977 - Photograph courtesy of John Collins

Having played with a rock band in the U.K. before, one thing I liked about Ghanaian music was that one did not have to strive to become a superstar in a band where instruments are organized hierarchically, e.g. into lead guitar, rhythm guitar and bass guitar. Instead, in a Ghanaian band in those days one could simply be one of the guitarists playing counter-melodies to each other. This principle of equity rather than top-down hierarchy in Ghanaian highlife guitar playing is derived from African polyphonic musical practices; for instance, each percussive instrument in a traditional drumming group is of equal importance to the polyrhythmic whole. Moreover, to be a good master drummer one cannot be an egoist who overshadows the ensemble, but must rather take a more laid-back approach that allows all the various sub-rhythms to be heard clearly. I learned this communal principal the hard way with another guitar band I played with in the early 1970s, when my electric guitar would be surreptitiously unplugged whenever I was taking an unnecessary solo.

It was also around this time that I began to appreciate the importance of two aspects of African music. The first was that rhythmic pulses, sounds and strikes are filled out with rhythmic space, i.e., the gaps and punctuations within individual sounded rhythmic patterns are not empty silences, but rather provide space for potential motion and imagination. As the famous Ghanaian musician Kofi Ghanaba — also known as Guy Warren — told me, music must be well ventilated, a notion completely opposite to the wall of sound found in some forms of rock music in which all silence is filled in and obliterated.

The other aspect of African musicking I learnt back in the 1970s concerns the fact that African music is not composed of a single loop of rhythm but a plurality of rhythmic circles that are stacked up onto each other, with each having different entry points into the poly-rhythmic cycle: much in the fashion of the staggered entrances in old European folksong catches or rounds or Baroque counter-point and the Canon Fugue. As in old-time European or African music no voice or beat is more important than the other. This musical feature I then began to connect with other areas of African lifestyle. Just as no single rhythm is allowed to dominate in music, so too no single deity or soul can claim the entire African ritual cosmos.

Moreover, in Ghanaian society, as in any society, music is a mnemonic in that it keeps the memories and events of a particular era, person or community alive. This role of music has been known since ancient antiquity and is why the Greek mother of music, poetry, dance and the other muses was Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. So it is no wonder that the bards of old Europe and the griots of Africa were able to keep history alive through songs. Even today in Africa griots impart age-old wisdom and drum-dances that re-enact historical events. Likewise, African slaves taken to the New World kept their ethnic memory, languages and religions alive through the secret performances of their nations.

Modern brain research has demonstrated that there is strong emotional charge imparted to auditory nerves that makes musical sounds and words as well as the context in which they are heard or played so highly memorable.

In Ghana, this mnemonic facility of performance can be found in the country’s popular music. Ghanaian highlife in fact goes back to the late 19th century and so its song text also provides a long-term running commentary on what the country has undergone during an era of rapid change: whether the struggle for independence or the attractions and danger of urbanization. Another important theme of the text of highlife songs and concert party musical plays is the catastrophic breakup of the traditional African extended family system in modern times that has resulted in bitter inheritance disputes and the emergence of the orphan and street child. Popular performance text also dwells on witchcraft as a cause of the unequal division of wealth, protests against corrupt and inefficient governments as well as marks out the identity of emergent youth cultures and reflects changing gender relations.

Along with a small group of like-minded local highlife fans and musicians, I decided that popular music — like traditional music — also needed to be preserved. Yet I did not begin as either a recordist or archivist. What happened was that I was running a local guitar band called Bokoor from the mid-1970s and I had just acquired the equipment to not only refurbish the Bokoor Band’s stage gear, but also to record. However, in 1981 there was a military coup followed by almost three years of night curfew. Bokoor band, like all others, was grounded, and so I switched to running a commercial recording studio — daytime recordings of course — at my father’s house on the outskirts of Accra. Like the band, I called it Bokoor Studio — bokoor means the spirit of coolness or calm in Twi, one of the languages used in Ghana — which I operated from 1982 until 1995 when I started teaching full time at the University of Ghana Music Department. In all, I recorded around 200 bands. While I was producing records, I was also collecting old shellac and vinyl records and photographs, as well as documents and interviews from the many musicians I met and worked with from 1969 in Ghana, Nigeria and Liberia. Eventually, I established the Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation in 1990, which focuses on preserving African popular music that had suffered from an almost 20 year long military era, when bands had folded up, nightclubs closed down and thousands of musicians left the country.

Currently I am working on a book that would bring together my knowledge of African music and also archaeology that I studied at the University of Ghana from 1969 to 1972. At that time the evidence for the African origin of hominids and humans and the fact that the humans race spread out from Africa was firmly established. But ever since then there has been more evidence of an artistic sensibility, music and dance being developed in Africa before humans moved out of Africa around 60-70,000 years ago.

The early comparative musicologists of the 19th century often made speculations on the evolution of music without hard evidence, and indeed put together a scheme that African music and musicking was a primitive low step in the evolution of music towards that of the supposedly higher culture of the West. This Eurocentric view ended when the ethnomusicology discipline appeared in the mid 20th century. It focused not on history, but on detailed synchronic studies of African music and its function in specific ethnic or village settings. While the initial focus was on the ethnographic-present, over the years an enormous amount of research has been done on the archaeology, prehistory and early history of pre-colonial Africa. Added to this are the cumulative studies of literally thousands of ethnomusicologists, both international ones who use the participant observer approach and African scholars who are often insiders within the culture they are studying. There exist now numerous monographs on music in specific small-scale African communities that not only provides us today with the details and functions of performed music and dance, but also and through the oral memories of elderly informants, their origin of their music.

For many years it has been supposed that the artistic sensibility in humans first appeared around 35,000 years ago in Europe, supported by the well documented cave painting in southern Europe. However recent finds in Southern Africa show humans were making ornaments, engravings and using red ochre as early 70,000 years ago, and around the same time had invented the bow and arrow and so very likely the musical bow. The evidence from Africa also makes a contribution to the question of the relationship between language and music. According to Steven Pinker, language evolved around 100,000 years ago, followed by music as a secondary and trivial offshoot. However, new fossil finds in Africa related to the cranial imprints of emerging speech centers and a dropped larynx suggest that both speech and language evolved at the same time and much earlier back as far as our distant African ancestor Homo Habilis around 1.7 million years ago — that communicated through emotional vocalizations as well as facial and body gestures, which later separated out into language, music and dance.

So at this point, with so many hard facts now gathered, it may be possible to re-examine the prehistory and early history of African music, not as a step in an Euro-centric evolutionary ladder but in terms of the development of music and dance within Africa itself and in its own terms. This history of African music includes the birth of the human music-making ability in stone-age times, the music of the ancient Sahara and the Nile, the African performing arts related to internal African migrations and the role of performance in early pre-colonial African societies, kingdoms and states.