Palmwine music styles in Ghana

Abstract

Abstract

This article examines the emergence and stylistic features of palmwine music in Ghana, with particular emphasis on its guitar-based rhythmic patterns and their relationship to the broader category of highlife music. While thesocio-historical development of highlife music has been extensively documented, palmwine music, often cited as a precursor, has received limited attention in terms of its sonic and structural distinctiveness. This article addresses two central questions: how do palmwine guitar styles relate to highlife, and what differentiates palmwine music from guitar-band highlife within a musicological framework? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in key Akan regions, including research undertaken during an immersive period in 2017, in this article, I argue that palmwine music should not be understood as merely an early form of highlife but as a distinct tradition with its own stylistic logic and historical trajectory. I re-examine existing narratives about the music tradition in Ghanaian popular music, analysing palmwine guitar rhythms as discrete musical forms. The article contributes to debates on musicological style in African popular music studies, reframing palmwine music as a foundational yet independently coherent style of highlife music.