The Kru seafarers

Assembled from 27 blocks · 1 evidence · 22 related

1. Story
2. A people of the Liberian and Sierra Leonean coast who worked in large numbers as sailors, stevedores and boat handlers on European vessels from the late eighteenth century onward, hired for their seamanship in surf conditions that European crews could not manage, and settling in Krutowns in port cities along the whole West African coast. They are the return current in this Journey. Kru seamen acquired guitars from European ships and, from the First World War onward, carried a two-finger picking technique along the coast from Freetown to Lagos, applying to the imported instrument a right-hand approach reported to derive from the playing of the Akan seperewa harp-lute. The dockside style that grew around this — palm-wine music, named for where it was played and drunk — is the direct ancestor of guitar-band highlife. The point is not that Africa received music from the Atlantic world; it is that the Atlantic was a circuit, that African seafarers were among its most mobile workers, and that they were choosing what to bring home.
3. Knowledge
4. West Africa
5. The Kru seafarers
6. Highlife
7. Connections
8. West Africa
9. Highlife
10. The Kumasi Trio record in London
11. Kora
12. Ngoni
13. Akonting
14. The West African drum ensemble
15. The Middle Passage
16. The trans-Saharan routes
17. The trans-Saharan routes
18. The Kru seafarers
19. Highlife
20. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
21. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
22. The Kru seafarers
23. West Africa
24. Guitar
25. The Kumasi Trio record in London
26. Evidence
27. Kru seamen of Liberia and Sierra Leone worked aboard European vessels, acquired guitars, and from the First World War onward spread a two-finger picking technique — reported to derive from Akan seperewa playing — along the West African coast through Krutown settlements, giving rise to dockside palm-wine music and thence to guitar-band highlife. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary from music-history sites rather than from ethnomusicological literature; none was opened, and the seperewa derivation rests on oral tradition reported at second hand.