Renowned author, musicologist and museum keeper, Prof John Collins, who has been associated with highlife music in Ghana for three decades  says the genre dates as far back as the late 19th century from a blend of three elements: the African, the European and the New World music of the Black Diaspora. This music form has now manifested as HIPLIFE

 He added that, there were three main forms of early Ghanaian highlife – Adaha, Fanti Osibisaaba and palm wine music.

He told this story on Tarzan’s Take on Multi TV, with Dr Charles Wereko Brobby, who incidentally is the publisher of Prof. John Collin’s  book ‘’Highlife time’’.

According to Prof. Collins, the first known form could be seen in the local Adaha brass-band music played in the 1880s on the Fanti coast, located in the south of modern Ghana.

This was the legacy left by the regimental bands of 6,000 West Indian soldiers, who had been stationed at the Cape Coast and Elmina Castles by the British colonial administration.

The musicologist revealed that Adaha music spread like wildfire throughout southern Ghana. In the small towns and villages that could not afford expensive brass band instruments, a poor man's drum-and-voice version called konkoma (or konkomba) developed in the 1930s and spread as far as Nigeria.

The second form of highlife, in his account, was Fanti Osibisaaba music in which local percussion instruments were accompanied by the guitars and the accordions of sailors, particularly the Kru seamen from Liberia.

It was the Kru Seamen, who, in the early 20th century, pioneered Africanised cross-fingering guitar techniques. This technique became key not only to the development of Ghanaian highlife, but also to the Maringa of Sierra Leone, the Juju music of western Nigeria and "dry" guitar music of Central Africa.

Coastal Fanti Osibisaaba highlife percolated into rural Ghana during the 1930s, where it fused with the music of the traditional Akan "seprewa" or harp-lute. This combination created a more rootsy style of highlife called "odonson", Akan "blues" or "palm-wine music".

Between the 1920s and 1940s, many records of the early guitar highlife styles of Jacob Sam, Kwame Asare, Mireku and Appiah Adgyekum were released by western record companies such as Zonophone, Columbia, Odeon and HMV, all based in Ghana.

Prof. John Collins, in his submission, mentioned that, the third type of highlife evolved from the large ballroom and ragtime dance orchestras formed from 1914: like the Excelsior Orchestra and Jazz Kings of Accra, the Winneba Orchestra, the Rag-a-jassbo Orchestra and Sugar Babies of  Cape Coast and the Ashanti Nkramo Orchestra. 

It was from this elitist form that the name ‘HIGHLIFE’, was coined in the mid 1920s by the poor people who gathered around the high-class dancing clubs when they heard local street songs being orchestrated. 

In his concluding remarks, the Professor of music at the University of Ghana urged contemporary highlife musicians and students to see the business potential of highlife music and package it attractively for both local and International market, in order to benefit from their creativity.