Customer Reviews

West African Pop Roots

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A little bio: John Collins' British father was a professor at the University of Ghana, where John spent most of his youth and developed his interest in music. At some point John studied medicine (came in helpful the night he had to deliver his nephew), but gave it up to be a musician/recording engineer/and eventually professor of music and the University of Ghana (he also had a bit part in Fela's attempted movie, but that's another story). He still lives at Bokor House outside Accra, and still plays in a band.

Anyway, between being a working musician, a recording engineer, and an archivist, he met/interviewed/worked with virtually everybody who was anybody in West African popular music from early highlife bandleaders like E.T. Mensah to the late Fela Kuti.

The book consists largely of short chapters about individual performers, grouped roughly according to chronology and geography. From this organization, one gets a sense of thematic developments and forces in the musicians' lives, but much of the material is anecdotal, letting the performers speak for themselves. And what anecdotes they are. The chapter on Fela alone is worth the price of the book, though to hear John relate it, he didn't tell half of the story.