African Sounds from the Past: ‘Day By Day’ by E.T Mensah (1987)

This cheerful musical throwback, released formally in 1987, features a collection of songs from E.T Mensah’s band, The Tempos, from their heydays back in the 50s and 60s, with inspiration from Spanish, South American, and West Indies sound. The calypsos heard throughout the album signify the musical connection between West Africa and the West Indies via the slave trade. This album is the second volume of vintage E.T Mensah music from the RetroAfric label, and I highly encourage listeners of Ghanaian music, as well as African music, to listen!

When Emmanuel Tettey Mensah, Ghanaian artist crowned ‘the King of Highlife’, was a boy, after school, he and his brother would join the Accra Rhythmic Orchestra and play European dance music. Simultaneously, he created his own style, incorporating new developments from Black American and West Indian music: his musical talents are already being developed.

Mensah then became the lead artist in The Tempos – a dance music band that started as a ‘jam session’ group by European soldiers stationed in Accra, Ghana. Adolf Doku, a Ghanaian pianist, and Arthur Harriman, the English engineer, set up the band, which would mark the take-off of a 50-year music career. Their band was gradually replaced by African soldiers, with Mensah joining the band at 28 with his friends Joe Kelly and Guy Warren. The band split up, later reuniting after the war, with Mensah at the lead. He used money from a pharmacy shop he had opened to finance the reformation.

Mensah’s band used calypso as a form of political resistance

The presence of calypsos throughout the album comes from Guy Warren, who had played with Afro-Caribbean musicians in America and Europe. He brought records which lead to post war influences on highlife. Calypso is a style of Caribbean music that originated from Afro-Trinidadians during the early to mid-19^th century, with rhythms that can be traced back to the Kaiso (west African music that was popularised in the Caribbean) and French slavers in the 18^th century.

It is characterised by rhythmic and harmonic vocals, and as English replaced Patois, calypso migrated to English, which attracted attention from the government – this is where its political importance comes in. It allowed people to challenge the actions of unelected Governor and Legislative Council, and the elected town councils of Port of Spain and San Fernando. Mensah’s band used calypso as a form of political resistance.

In the album, one of his calypsos, ‘Ghana-Guinea-Mali’, which commemorates the union of these three West African countries (one of my favourite songs; it’s beautiful), are songs supporting Ghanaian nationalism – with jazz influences – further influenced by African American intellectual figures.

This Ghanaian genre uses the melodic and main rhythmic structures of traditional African music but is typically played with Western instruments

His comments about highlife as a musical genre revolve around it being an attempt to use indigenous rhythm as a replacement for “fading foreign music of waltz and rumba”. This highlife sound became a symbol of the early independence era. Bob Jones says, “its use of a western jazz-combo format to play African music reflected independence itself, when the western socio-economic colonial format became Africanised.”

Highlife as a genre, characterised by jazzy horns and a two-finger plucking guitar style, was popularised by E.T Mensah. This Ghanaian genre uses the melodic and main rhythmic structures of traditional African music but is typically played with Western instruments. It infuses traditional African drums into Western blues, creating songs like ‘205’.

My personal favourite songs from this album are ‘Kaa Wo Na’ and ‘Daavi Loloto’ – cheerful numbers that remind me of summer. They also feel a bit nostalgic; as a West African myself, they remind me of summer garden parties (which I’ve grown to love).

I found this album on a music website called Radiooooo.com. I strongly encourage finding music beyond the algorithm and finding a new genre of music you wouldn’t normally listen to. It has a range of years (1900 – present), and if you click on a year and any country, it will play music from that year and that country. It relies on people discovering and posting songs to the website – a real collectivist way of discovering new music. I clicked on a country, then clicked on the website of the person who discovered the song and scrolled through his vinyl shop. That’s how I found this beautiful, late 80s, Ghanaian album.