Popular Bands of Sierra Leone: 1920 to the Present

Abstract

1920 to the present, is intended to fill a gap in an area of musical activity where there has been a dearth of documentation. It is based on data that I have collected over a long period of time with the hope of being able to achieve that objective. In this paper, a survey of the activities of popular and popular musicians during the years 1920s-1980 will be interworked with an appraisal of the instrumentation, playing style, and other aspects of a selected repertory of popular music. In particular, selected texts of a class of popular songs of Sierra Leone in vernacular languages will be analyzed as illustrative of a Tin Pan Alley type of music found in Sierra Leone. The year 1920 is chosen as a convenient starting point since records about popular or musicians before that date are hard to find, if there ever were any such bands. In the interviews I conducted with retired members of popular bands, their comments confirmed the virtual absence of such before the 1920s. It was this situation that caused men and boys of the so-called boys of the C.M.S. Grammar School (i.e., Church Missionary Society Grammar School) and the Wesleyan Boys High School to come together to form the popular that began to appear in the 1920s and 1930s. Before and after 1920 there were music schools for girls and young ladies, to which the Casely-Hayfords (particularly Chief Mrs. Adelaide Casely-Hayford) made their laudable contributions. Also, according to newspaper announcements in the Sierra Leone Weekly News, in Freetown (the capital city) there were regular offerings of concerts, operettas, and choral performances, both religious and secular. In fact, such announcements can be traced back as far as 1886, the year a notice was published about a solo concert to be given in Freetown by a European named Snell.' As stated above, when popular began to appear in the 1920s, their membership consisted of those who had been recruited from the old boys bands of the two secondary schools. It should be observed that the bandmasters of those bands, Henry Smart and Professor Ebenezer Johnson Greywoode, contributed in no small measure to providing the necessary inspiration and basic