Sub-Saharan African Folk Music

Sub-Saharan African folk music is the continental umbrella for the Indigenous traditional musics of Africa south of the Sahara: an immense field unified less by a single sound than by shared principles — interlocking polyrhythm, call-and-response singing, and instruments built from local materials, from the West African kora and balafon to the mbira thumb piano of Zimbabwe and the gourd-resonated xylophones of the east. Carried by griots, praise singers, initiation societies and village ensembles, these traditions underpin nearly every later African popular style, from highlife and Afrobeat to mbalax and desert blues.