Highlife
The 7 Best Highlife
Tracks of All Time
West Africa's first great popular music: Akan rhythms and palm-wine guitar meeting brass-band and swing arrangements in coastal Ghana, recorded from 1928 and named for the clubs ordinary people were not admitted to.
- Origin
- Ghana and coastal West Africa, 1928
- Tempo
- 100–140 BPM
- Also known as
- high life, guitar band highlife, dance band highlife, palm-wine music
- Tracks
- 7
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
Take this list to YouTube → (opens in a new tab)
Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here.
Number 1: Kwame Asare / Yaa Amponsah
1928 · Zonophone
Recorded in London with the Kumasi Trio, and the first Ghanaian highlife on record. Its finger-picked guitar figure became a rhythm other musicians simply refer to by name.
Number 2: E.T. Mensah & The Tempos / All For You
1952 · Decca
Mensah put a dance band behind highlife and took it across West Africa. Louis Armstrong sat in with the Tempos in Accra, which tells you how good the horn section was.
Number 3: Prince Nico Mbarga / Sweet Mother
1976 · Rogers All Stars
Reckoned to be the best-selling African single ever made. A pidgin-English song about a mother's love over a guitar line of total sweetness, and utterly unembarrassed by any of it.
Also on 1976, Sung to Someone
Number 4: Nana Ampadu & The African Brothers Band / Ebi Te Yie
1967
An animal fable about who gets the comfortable seat, read as criticism of the military government and pulled off the radio. Highlife's most elegant piece of political smuggling.
Number 5: Sir Victor Uwaifo / Joromi
1965
A Benin folk hero, a guitar figure that circles rather than resolves, and Nigeria's first gold record. Uwaifo built his own guitars, which sounds about right.
Number 6: Gyedu-Blay Ambolley / Simigwa Do
1975
Highlife with the funk turned all the way up and a rapped Fante vocal years before anyone in New York had a word for that. Genuinely ahead of itself.
Number 7: Osibisa / Sunshine Day
1976 · Bronze
Ghanaian and Caribbean musicians in London, making highlife that charted in Britain without diluting the percussion. The diaspora version, and a very good one.
Also on 1976