Ethnomusicologist and lecturer Professor John Collins has discounted claims that Liberians may be the true originators of highlife.

This comes on the back of several contestations of the origin of the genre which has been widely touted to be Ghanaian.

Contrary to the notion that the Kru Sailors from Liberian teaching Ghanaian guitarists how to play the western guitar with two-finger-picking technique means they introduced the genre, Professor Collins has said, that does not make them owners of the genre.

He told Kwame Dadzie on Joy FM’s Showbiz A-Z although some Western African countries als do highlife, Ghanaians are on record to have created the genre in the 1920s.

"The Kru players developed distinct ways of playing the guitar on the high seas in the 19th century. Kru's were recruited on board a lot of slave ships by the Europeans and Americans. So they picked up the Spanish guitar but they didn't use the Spanish way of playing or picking the strings. They used the typical African style like King Ayisoba - the way Africans play the lute.

That's what the Kru people spread down the coast of West Africa but it wasn't highlife. It was a sort of an element of highlife. In Ghana, it was absorbed into the Osibisaba music and in Sierra Leone the Maringa, and in Nigeria, juju music," he said.

Although some countries keep laying claim to highlife, people like Professor John Collins have over the years attributed the origin to Ghana in various books, workshops and documentary.

In the meantime, the United Nation's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation is considering listing highlife as Ghana's intangible cultural heritage.

A few weeks ago, Ama Serwah Nerquaye-Tetteh, the Secretary General of the Ghana Commission for UNESCO, mentioned that highlife will be listed by UNESCO as Ghana’s intangible heritage soon.

This comes after series of engagements and conferences organised by the Ghana Folklore Board and the Ghana Cultural Forum to discuss plans by which Ghana’s highlife can be listed as a UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH).

An intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is a practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill considered by UNESCO to be part of a place’s cultural heritage.

Intangible heritage consists of non-physical intellectual wealth, such as folklore, customs, beliefs, traditions, knowledge, and language.

Intangible cultural heritage is considered by member states of UNESCO in relation to the tangible World Heritage, focusing on intangible aspects of culture.

Jamaica’s reggae and Congo’s rhumba are some music genres listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage.