Highlife Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana

Highlife Saturday Night captures the vibrancy of Saturday nights in Ghana--when musicians took to the stage and dancers took to the floor--in this penetrating look at musical leisure during a time of social, political, and cultural change. Framing dance band highlife music as a central medium through which Ghanaians negotiated gendered and generational social relations, Nate Plageman shows how popular music was central to the rhythm of daily life in a West African nation. He traces the history of highlife in urban Ghana during much of the 20th century and documents a range of figures that fueled the music's emergence, evolution, and explosive popularity. This book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.

Author: Nathan Plageman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 12/19/2012
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.92lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780253007292

About the Author

Nate Plageman is Assistant Professor of History at Wake Forest University.