palm wine guitar music (from west africa)

everybody should get that "marvellous boy" comp on honest jon's.

i have a lot more of this music, if slocki wants to get in touch i can send him some.

Yes, Marvellous Boy is good! It's funny that they subtitled it "Calypso From West Africa" when imho "Palm Wine Guitar From West Africa" is both more accurate and probably more appealing to your average consumer? Did you ever pick up the Juju Roots comp on Rounder? It does have a bit of palm wine guitar on it.

some of those records were originally labeled as "calypsos" so it's not too much of a stretch (though they don't resemble trinidadian calypso very closely).

those honest jon's comps (the ones from the emi archives) are a bit odd. "marvellous boy" and the west african comp, at least, have cover photos of very "un-western" looking african folks that date to well before the period when the music was recorded, and seem to promise something more, for the lack of a better word, "tribal." the whole curatorial approach seeks to play up the strangeness of the music, and that's fine, but i think they overdo it sometimes. i mean those highlife bands were as western as anything in africa at the time, insofar as they had whole horn sections, string bass, dudes in nice suits, etc. so why put a bunch of dudes in tribal attire with native drums on the cover?

consider me... in touch! should i webmail you?

hmm, actually contact me on facebook if you please.

Couldn't believe there wasn't a dedicated S.E. Rogie thread but fair enough.

If you have never heard the "Palm Wine Guitar Music" comp then your life is tragically incomplete. The playing, the production, the voice, the songs. Jesus.

"Do Me Justice" is the best record ever made no lie.

I'm going to check that out - do you have anything to say about "Dead Men Don't Smoke Marijuana", his album on Realworld?

It's an ok realworld-type record but the sixties stuff is incredible.

Some of the production magic is lost on "Dead Men" - the 60s records have an almost Motown-ish "recorded at the end of a tunnel" sound that adds greatly to their charm, it adds unbelievable warmth to the guitar sound - makes it sound like you're at a family party. But most of everything else great about Rogie is still there on the 90s album, and the sound certainly isn't bad, just less special. The playing is still beautiful and fluid plus you get Danny Thompson I think who definitely adds something. It's a great record and the fact that it's lesser (to me) than the godlike qualities of the 60s work isn't really a criticism.

Just went and got "Palm Wine Guitar Music" off Amazon so will report back later.

Enjoy it! "Advice To Schoolgirls" is my jam.

"Advice to Schoolgirls" makes me laugh a lot and then o_O a little.

I know, it's fucked up but real pretty. Reminds me a little bit of some of the more gentle Joseph Spence/Bahamian folk stuff.

He released a late-1980s LP on Worker's Playtime which is excellent, almost as good as the '60s stuff. I also have a copy of his self-published songbook from the mid 1970s. Lyrics for his songs, but also those of folks like Jim Reeves. Lots of ads for Freetown (Sierra Leone) businesses, photo and prose tributes to Sierra Leone politicians and other powerful figures. And an introduction sort of written by Val Wilmer, who gets a full-page picture, the caption to which reads "Beautiful English woman" (or something to that effect).

Oh and by complete chance I walked into a 2nd-rate record store in Chicago a few months ago and found a copy of a self-released LP, AFRICAN LADY, by Rogie released in the 1970s. It has some cut-rate "soul" touches and is the least of his albums (of the ones I've heard) but I still enjoy it.

AFRICAN LADY was released when he was living in California, by the way.

Just to be contrary, I will add that I got drunk with a lady from West Africa once and the mere thought of palm wine makes me queasy.

Oprah admits she's not big on short stories, but her latest pick is a stunning collection by a Nigerian priest that reflects Africa through the eyes of its children. "I was born under a palm-wine tree in Ikot Ekpene Diocese in Nigeria," writes Akpan. "I was inspired to write by the people who sit around my village church to share palm wine after Sunday Mass, by the Bible, and by the humor and endurance of the poor."

Oprah's new book choice is Uwem Akpan's "Say You're One Of Them"

Ah yes, I meant to post again on here. Got the "Palm Wine Guitar Music" album and have been playing it loads. Lovely ambience to it and puts a smile on my face. Thanks for recommending it, NV and others.

He released a late-1980s LP on Worker's Playtime which is excellent, almost as good as the '60s stuff. I also have a copy of his self-published songbook from the mid 1970s. Lyrics for his songs, but also those of folks like Jim Reeves. Lots of ads for Freetown (Sierra Leone) businesses, photo and prose tributes to Sierra Leone politicians and other powerful figures. And an introduction sort of written by Val Wilmer, who gets a full-page picture, the caption to which reads "Beautiful English woman" (or something to that effect).

― amateurist, Thursday, September 17, 2009 12:34 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really thought that said val kilmer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_Wilmer

-- sort of a hero of mine.

that Worker's Playtime album - The Palm Wine Sounds of S.E. Rogie is brilliant btw. The sound is so sharp the guitar just pings out of the mix. Hannah just asked me "why is this so funky?"

Windsor just reminded me of this thread which reminded me of this track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC0jhKwuxFU

which is a FRIDAY NIGHT JAM boys and girls

i've been listening to so much palm wine lately

here's my palm-wine playlist: http://open.spotify.com/user/mordys/playlist/4v23GlH3nTfURT2mFpKt3s

we took a long walk on the bala heritage trail last weekend and i played it off a speaker in d's stroller - it's pretty much the perfect warm spring day walk music

x-p Haha, maybe a little bit up for my current state of mind. I blundered across this thread in the first place because I was listening to this song on repeat -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDO_o-w9vj0

which is way more where I'm at right now. drunken boredom / kind of loneliness, coloured by a general awareness that things aren't that bad and even if they were, so what? There's some lovely music out there, that'll do for now

thanks for that Mordy, was momentarily baffled as to why it wouldn't open properly but then realised it was because I'm playing 'Twist With The Morningstars' right now anyway as it's after Elizabeth in Rogie's Spotify top 10.

it makes me so happy listening to it

this fits more into wistful Rogie mode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CecjgFr-Oq8

Ah man, that's absolutely beautiful. Clearly never lost it

i've never heard this Godwin Omabuwa "Dick Tiger's Victory" track before tnite but it's really a gem

that atakora manu youtube track is amazing, NV, more like that plz

who is the female vocalist on E.T. Mensah's "The Tree and the Monkey?"

xp Mordy i've got that whole Atakora Manu record on mp3, the rest doesn't seem to be on Youtube tho, cd Leonardo it if you're interested?

worst day ever. thank god for s.e. rogie + palm wine music

lots of nice stuff on this thread

John Peel used to play the shit out of that SE Rogie album. Never owned it but feel like I know it so well. Need to check out some of these other folks for sure.

love this stuff so much

i can't get enough of it

thx for the spotify mix mordy

honest to god spotify has really made ILM so much more amazing to me now, so cool w.stuff like this or any of the rolling threads

i'm completely infatuated w/ "the tree and the monkey" from the marvellous boy compilation and i wish i knew who was singing on it bc i would love to hear her sing more

i asked honest jon's and they aren't sure but think maybe Juliana Okine - she's got one google scholar reference on a totes out of print book called "flagbearers of ghana" and a slight reference in this article: http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/people/pop-up.php?ID=144

do any ilxors know where i could find copies of either the 'all for you' or 'day by day' e.t. mensah comps for purchase or otherwise?

ha nm, apparently amazon has them for sale

Music appears to have played some role in the construction of social networks among African workers in Lagos. As one elderly guitarist in Lagos described it:

It is from all this sort of music that people got the idea of developing one tune to another. You know, when you hear a record and it's nice, it's likely you'll begin to sing it alone, in the bed or in the bathroom. That is how this thing happens, you know. If you have a G. V. record, and I'm living very near you, I'll be expecting you to play that record in the morning, and I can because of that become your friend. I'll be visiting you, "Mo like record-e" [I like your record], and we'll drink beer and palmwine.

Some of the stuff on your mix really suprised me at how country influenced it sounded

Gramophone discs imported by European firms such as the United Africa Company, Witt and Busch, and the Compagnie Francaise d'Afrique Occidental expanded the repertories of Lagosian guitarists. American country music star Jimmie Rodgers was very popular during the 1920s and 1930s.

Yeah my best friend from high school roomed w a guy from nigeria one year in college and he said his family really liked jim reeves and that real saccharine countrypolitan stuff

how great is that song "she caught me red hot" btw? that whole collection is a++

Been getting heavy into this stuff lately, and African music from '30-'75 in general, but as someone new to a lot of this, can someone help me distinguish between palm wine, high life and juju? Are these genre names just temporal distinctions with increasing immersion of other styles, ie bop > hard bop > fusion, or does it have to do with region of origin, or what? What I've gleaned is that palm wine came first, and is the more country-calypso sounding stuff, and then highlife took those rhythms and electrified (figuratively and literally) the sounds, adding Afro beat, rock and roll, etc. I see Hurting's definition of Juju upthread, but i still have no idea what Juju actually sounds like as opposed to highlife. From the bit of reading I've done, it seems to have come after highlife. Is that corect?

Juju music, a local variant of the urban west african palm wine guitar tradition, emerged as a defined genre in the Nigerian colonial capital of Lagos around 1932… The initial popularizer of juju was a Lagosian guitarist named Tunde King. He incorporated elements of syncretic Christian hymnody, asiko drumming, and ijinlee Yoruba poetic rhetoric into the labile palmwine framework. Although musicians in Lagos were already performing similar styles, "T.K." was the first juju practitioner to develop a following among the colonial black elite, and the first to be commercially recorded. His contemporaries thus generally regard him as the man who "brought juju music out." Early juju style remained remarkably stable from 1932 through the Second World War. As veteran juju musician Ojoge Daniel expresses it, the style's trajectory may be broadly characterized as an initial burst of innovation followed by a long period of "small-small shifts" in performance practice.

I find myself wishing the songs on those Nigeria Special and Ghana Special comps had less vocals. To my Western ears, a lot of the chanty call-and-response stuff starts to sound tediously similar. How are the Nigeria 70 comps?

I like the Nigeria 70 comps better than the Soundway comps

not for a particular reason, I just think those guys choose better tracks

Yeah I find it to be an annoying drawback to stuff like the Soundway comps -- great music, but not much respect for the music. They present it like it's all part of some Old Weird Africa.

― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Wednesday, June 5, 2013 2:19 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

90% of that stuff is post-1960s and palm wine stuff has it roots much earlier and indeed s.e. rogie probably would have been considered to have an "old-fashioned" repertoire when he was recording in the 60s and 70s

oh I know, I didn't mean Old Weird Africa in time period, I more mean that it all becomes this single, vague, exoticized place with a BIZARRO version of rock and funk.

i'm not sure you can levy that accusation what with all the detailed liner notes and stuff

but it does strike me that all the interest in post-rock african music hasn't really excited that much interest in earlier genres.... or so it seems....

i think a lot of the older stuff isn't as available as the 70s music. Waterman mentions a bunch of recordings that he says he couldn't locate --

The earliest recordings known to me of Yoruba songs with guitar accompaniment were made in England in the late 1920s by the Zonophone Company. The Catalogue of Zonophone West African Records by Native Artists, published in Hayes, Middlesex in 1929, includes a number of songs in Yoruba with guitar and tambourine accompaniment, performed by Domingo Justus. None of my older informants mentioned Justus, and I haev no been able to locate any of these discs for analysis. The first recordigns of palmwine music with guitar accompaniment made in Lagos, performed by Irewolede Denge and Dickson Oludaiye, were part of the Odeon series previously mentioned. The masters of these recordings were likely kept in Germany and lost during the Second World War, and I have not managed to find any of the discs.

I'd love to hear some more palmwine recordings than the few that have been reissued. Maybe there's an archive we could get access to somewhere? Actually, I was hunting around for these discs recently: http://www.afrodisc.com/parlophone_po_500_599.79.html but I can't figure out who has them.

here's a motherload of west african music in various genres, albeit only some that might be categorized as "palm-wine guitar music": http://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Decca-West-African-recordings

i actually managed to download the 100s of tracks in this collection and converted them to MP3s. i could try to share but it's like 10 GB.

oh man that;s beautiful thank you thank you

I always see King Sunny's albums cheap but never pick 'em up

Oh man, most anything pre 1985 or so from Sunny is awesome

i think the british library's "sounds" site is kind of underutilized in general, maybe because everything is streaming as opposed to easily downloadable, and it's not as user-friendly as it could be. but it's an amazing resource.

i mean check out http://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Ethnographic-wax-cylinders

i'm sure i've been to the sounds site before and then forgot it existed

http://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Decca-West-African-recordings/025M-1CS0043769XX-0200V0

(listen to that one!)

(or this one)

http://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Decca-West-African-recordings/025M-1CS0089424XX-0200V0

So much stuff! Hard to keep track of it all. Anyway, just bought that Waterman book, which will likely only increase my list of things to check out. Thanks, gang.

yeah I read that Waterman book in college, which is a long time ago now and I don't remember much of it. but liked it at the time.

i thought that jollof rice song sounded familiar so i searched it on spotify/my local library -- it turns out i didn't have a copy of it, but searching it brought up this album which is apparently really new and has a jollof rice track on it?! http://www.mvulamandondo.com/album/ambush/

like really new = a few days old i think

this is the same tracklisting as the Palm Wine Guitar Music comp but i'm hoping the vol 1 means we can expect a vol 2

http://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Rogie-Limited-Edition-Vinyl/dp/B00CIOG4BA

Just came looking for a thread on SE Rogie after finding The Sounds of SE Rogie on LP this weekend. Initial thoughts were Rogie = African Hank Williams but it's a very simplistic analogy. Enjoying this with the windows open and a warm breeze flowing through the house.

http://i2.wp.com/ameyawdebrah.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/paper-front.jpg?resize=620%2C620

somehow missed this came out last year

You know what's a good album ? Seven Degrees North (2000) by King Sunny Adé.

I tried (bottled) palm wine two weeks ago. It was light, sweetish, slightly tart, not bad but not something I'd trade a beer for.