Highlife

Highlife is a West African dance music that emerged in coastal Ghana in the early twentieth century, fusing local Akan rhythms and palm-wine guitar styles with Western ballroom, calypso, swing and Afro-Cuban elements. It developed in two main branches: urban dance bands with brass and reed sections playing for elite club audiences, from which the genre took its name, and rural guitar bands singing in local languages over interlocking guitar patterns and percussion. Sung in Twi, Ga, Yoruba, Igbo and English, highlife became the foundational popular music of Ghana and Nigeria and a seedbed for Afrobeat.