Highlife Saturday Night Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana [Paperback]

Highlife Saturday Night captures the vibrancy of Saturday nights in Ghanawhen musicians took to the stage and dancers took to the floorin 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 musics emergence, evolution, and explosive popularity. This book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.

This book is well-written and will appeal to those interested in Ghanaian urban history and highlife music, as well as those wanting to know more about youth and popular culture in general. The analysis of the history and organization of the social and literary clubs is some of the most insightful in the book. Plageman also excels in his portrayal of highlife music, musicians, and middle-class men. This book makes significant contributions to the history of highlife music and successfully weaves highlife musical culture into the wider social and political net of urban Ghana.Highlife Saturday Night is an impressive monograph that should remind scholars of the porous nature of disciplinary boundaries, and reaffirm the important perspective symbolic-aesthetic forms like music offer the humanities and social sciences, and in this case, the construction of West African social history.

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

Acknowledgements
Ethnomusicology Multimedia Series Preface
Introduction: The Historical Importance of Urban Ghanas Saturday Nights
1. Popular Music, Political Authority, and Social Possibilities in the Southern Gold Coast, 1890-1940
2. The Mal³!