Palm-wine Music

Palm-wine music is a West African guitar style that developed in the port towns of Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia in the early 20th century, named for the palm wine bars where it was played. Sailors of the Kru people spread a two-finger guitar technique that local musicians combined with Indigenous song, church harmony and imported popular records, producing relaxed, lilting music for drinking, dancing and storytelling. Played in small groups of guitars, concertina, harmonica and percussion made from bottles and boxes, it became the seedbed of highlife and the first modern popular music of coastal West Africa.