Highlife Saturday Night

The story of highlife music and the culture that revolved around it in Ghana, before and after independence-includes links to audiovisual content. Highlife Saturday Night captures the vibrancy of Saturday nights in Ghana when musicians took to the stage and dancers took to the floor in a penetrating look at musical leisure during a time of social, political, and cultural change. Framing dance band 'highlife' music as a central medium through which Ghanaians negotiated gendered and generational social relations, Nate Plageman shows how popular music was central to the rhythm of daily life in a West African nation. He traces the history of highlife in urban Ghana during much of the twentieth century and documents a range of figures who fueled the music's emergence, evolution, and explosive popularity. This book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.