Every blues history opens with a chapter set in Africa and then leaves. The banjo comes from West African lutes; the argument about how much of the blues is African has run for a century. Meanwhile the continent gets one paragraph, as if the music stopped at the coast. It didn't. These five guitarists were playing the blues — their own versions of it, on their own terms — in Katanga, Freetown, Kumasi and Bamako.
The guitar reached Africa in the 1920s and 1930s through trading stores and mission schools, and it was picked up the way it was picked up in Mississippi: by ear, by imitation, and by argument with what came before. Within twenty years there were distinct regional styles — palm-wine guitar along the West African coast, the two-finger Katanga school in the Congo, the pentatonic desert blues of Mali — each with its own repertoire, its own stars and its own recording industry.
What is worth saying plainly is that this was not preservation. These musicians were modernising, and listening outward as hard as anyone in Memphis. Jean Bosco Mwenda named Cuban groups and cowboy films among his influences. S.E. Rogie learned phrasing from his brother's Jimmie Rodgers records. Boubacar Traoré tuned his guitar to the tonality of the kora and then played Chuck Berry on the radio to a newly independent country. The traffic ran in both directions, which is the part the canon finds hardest to hold.
So why are these men not in the blues section? Because by the 1960s the blues had been defined — by the people who wrote about it and the labels that reissued it — as an American genre with a Black American audience and a Mississippi delta. A Malian guitarist selling records across West Africa in 1962 was not reviewed in the blues press; he was filed under âworld music,â a shelving decision made in London and New York that then decided who got a box set, a reissue campaign, and a career in the West. Ali Farka Touré broke through as the exception. The five below are the rule.
Three lutes, one harp, and the American instrument they became. None of them crossed the Atlantic intact. What crossed was the design of them: a drum for a body, a hide for a head, a string that never stops sounding, and a hand that comes down rather than up.
A bridge harp on a calabash gourd, with a rosewood neck, an antelope-hide soundboard and twenty-one strings played thumb-and-forefinger by hereditary jeli. Mungo Park described it in 1799. It never crossed in the slave trade, because no griot did; its route is modern, through recordings — Toumani Diabaté's solo albums, his 1999 record with Taj Mahal, Kulanjan, and the kora tuning Boubacar Traoré copies on six strings.
Four to seven strings over an oblong wooden or gourd body with an animal-hide face, played by jelis and, in its donso form, by Wassoulou hunters. For most of the twentieth century the ngoni was assumed to be the banjo's ancestor. The scholarship moved: its wooden resonator and footless bridge don't match early banjos the way the akonting does. What crossed was the principle, not the instrument.
Two melody strings fingered with the left hand and two to four fixed octave strings plucked open, over a cowhide face on a wooden body. Played by xalamkat to carry praise songs and genealogies. Senegambia supplied a large share of the people enslaved in the American South, and this percussive, plucked attack is what travelled in their ears. The instrument stayed home. The technique didn't.
Three strings — two long, one short drone — on a calabash gourd with a goatskin head, a neck that runs right through the body and a bridge with feet, struck downward with the index finger while the thumb catches the drone. Since the 2000s, work by Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta, Shlomo Pestcoe, Greg Adams and Ulf Jägfors has made it the leading candidate for the early banjo's nearest living relative.
Built in the Caribbean by enslaved Africans out of what was to hand — gourd body, hide head, and a flat fingerboard with tuning pegs borrowed from European instruments. Reported in Jamaica in 1687 and in Manhattan by 1736; played by Black musicians until the 1840s, when white minstrels took it onto the stage and sold it back to America as a caricature of the people who invented it.
One player to each instrument, in the tradition it comes from — four ways into a family of music that runs from a gourd in Casamance to a banjo in Kentucky.
Born into a jeli family in Bamako, he taught himself his father's instrument and then made the kora a solo concert instrument rather than an accompaniment: Kaira (1988) is generally called the first album of unaccompanied kora. He heard the connection to the blues early and said so in public — his 1999 record with Taj Mahal, Kulanjan, is the clearest statement of it — and spent the rest of his life opening the instrument to flamenco, jazz and orchestra. He died in July 2024, at fifty-eight.
From Garana, sixty kilometres from Ségou, descended from griots on both sides, playing since he was twelve. He was in Ali Farka Touré's band for Savane and for Touré's final tour in 2005, then did the thing that made his name: put four ngonis on a stage together as Ngoni Ba, and play standing up, which the tradition had not done. Segu Blue (2007), produced by Lucy Durán, was the result — the instrument treated as a lead guitar at last.
A Gawlo Halpulaar griot from Louga, and for half a century the best-known xalamkat in Senegal — genealogist, chronicler and poet as much as musician. He was a voice of Sénégal Demb on Radio Sénégal for years, helped found the national lyric ensemble at the Sorano theatre in 1962, and was named a UNESCO living human treasure in 2006. He learned technique by travelling to Mali to sit with ngoni masters, which is the family resemblance made practical rather than theoretical.
A Gambian Jola scholar and musician who began documenting his people's folk lute in the mid-1980s, after his father — an akonting player from the instrument's Casamance birthplace — asked him to keep it alive. In 2000 he demonstrated the akonting to a banjo collectors' conference in the United States, which is the moment the argument about the banjo's ancestry changed shape. He runs the Akonting Center for Senegambian Folk Music in Mandinari, and calls the right-hand stroke o'teck — “to strike.”
One country each, roughly, and a different answer to the same question: what do you do with an American instrument and a local ear?
Born in Kayes, in the dry west of Mali, he was nicknamed Kar Kar for his dribbling, and by the early 1960s he was the sound of a country inventing itself. His songs — âMali Twist,â âKayebaâ — were on national radio every morning, and he was the first to put Manding melodies on an electric guitar, tuning the instrument to the tonality of the kora so that a Mississippi vocabulary came out sounding like something else entirely.
Then the politics turned. After the coup of November 1968 the new government had no use for the old government's singer, and Kar Kar vanished from the airwaves. He went home to Kayes and became a farmer, a tailor, a shopkeeper, a teacher, an agricultural agent — whatever fed eleven children, five of whom died young. When his wife Pierrette died in 1987 he left for France and worked construction, sharing rooms with other Malian labourers. A British producer heard a bootlegged tape of one of his radio performances, and his first album, Mariama, came out in 1990 — twenty-two years after his career had been cancelled by a change of government.
Hugh Tracey found him playing in the street in Jadotville in 1949 and recorded him there in 1952. âMasangaâ — a single guitar piece, arpeggios turning over and over, no band behind it — won the Osborn Award for the best African record of that year and then travelled further than its author did. Tracey's recordings went out across the continent; in Nairobi, Mwenda's radio show made him the model for a generation of Kenyan guitarists. Segments of the âMasangaâ theme turned up, rearranged for orchestra, in a piece by the English composer William Walton.
He recorded more than 150 tunes between 1952 and 1962 while holding down a bank job in Elisabethville, and then went quiet for a quarter of a century — not lost, not dead, just working. When a Cape Town label finally recorded him again in 1988 he was playing better than ever; he died in a car accident in Zambia in September 1990, before the album could be released. Mwenda wa Bayeke came out posthumously, and the obituaries were shorter than the ones for the men who had copied him.
Sooliman Ernest Rogers was a tailor's apprentice in Freetown who taught himself guitar off his brother's gramophone records — country and western, Jimmie Rodgers yodelling and all — and sang in four languages: English, Krio, Mende and Temne. Palm-wine guitar was the coastal style, gentle and conversational, and he was its most elegant practitioner. âMy Lovely Elizabeth,â cut in 1962, was picked up by EMI for worldwide release, which made him briefly international in the way that mattered in 1962.
He did the thing most of the names on this site never got to do: he bought his own pressing equipment, started his own labels — Rogiephone — and released his own records. He also did the thing that teaches you how the business works: in 1965 he formed a band called the Morningstars and lost more than half his investment when the musicians were poached after two months. He spent the 1970s and 80s in California playing schools, moved to London in 1988 at the invitation of the DJ Andy Kershaw, and recorded one last album with Danny Thompson on bass. He had heart surgery in February 1994, toured anyway, collapsed on stage, and died that July, aged 68, weeks before Dead Men Don't Smoke Marijuana came out.
Bourama Traoré came from a village on the Niger near Ségou, sang in a regional folklore orchestra as a teenager, and then heard Zani Diabaté's Super Djata Band and understood what an electric guitar could do in Bambara. What he built from that was âbambara bluesâ: Manding melody, distorted guitar, a band that played like a rock group, and a voice The Economist described as âflat, strangely penetrating, somewhere between rap and blues.â He played weddings, then the Bar Bozo in Bamako, and then — with Ali Farka Touré producing his second album, Bamako, in 1994 — the outside world.
It should have been a long career. Bamako was named one of the year's best rock albums by Libération; Ségou and Duga followed; he toured with a French harmonica player and cut a solo acoustic record, Rainy Season Blues, that sounds like a field recording made in a room with the windows shut. He died in Bamako on 1 June 2010, aged 49 — reports differ on the cause, and his early albums were already out of print by then. The best of his live playing, Bamako Nights, was recorded at the Bar Bozo in 1995 and not released until 2013.
Kwabena Boa-Amponsem grew up around the kete drums of Asante royal ensembles, was teaching drumming, guitar and brass band music in his village at nineteen, and took formal guitar lessons while in London on a chemistry scholarship. He then spent most of his working life as chief laboratory technician in the chemistry department at Kumasi, retiring in 1998 — which is the detail that makes the rest of it remarkable. In 1957 he formed Adadam Agofomma, a roots ensemble built around palm-wine guitar: a two-finger picking style of great complexity, carrying proverbs and stories in Twi over highlife harmonies and, in his hands, chord voicings borrowed from classical guitar and jazz.
He was president of Ghana's musicians' union, interim chairman of its copyright society — a job that put him on the other side of the desk from the industry that had short-changed so many of the people on this site — and the first Ghanaian to release a compact disc of his own music, in 1990. He has played Lincoln Center; he has also played funerals and outdoorings in Kumasi, which is where the repertoire came from in the first place. Sources disagree on whether he was born in 1931 or 1934. He has never had the Anglo-American reissue campaign that a guitarist of his standing would have received with a Mississippi postal address.
âFlat, strangely penetrating tone, somewhere between rap and blues.â
The Economist on Lobi Traoré's voice, 2005Sources for this page: Hugh Tracey and David Rycroft's writing on the Katanga guitar style in African Music; the Sierra Leone Journal entry on S.E. Rogie; AllMusic and label biographies for Boubacar Traoré, Lobi Traoré and Koo Nimo; Agya Koo Nimo's own discography; and the standard discographies of Gallotone, Buda Musique, Honest Jon's, Sterns and Real World. For the instruments: Shlomo Pestcoe and Greg Adams on the Jola akonting, Ulf Jägfors, Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta, the Smithsonian’s banjo collections, Mungo Park’s 1799 account of the kora, and the 2022 statistical comparison of the banjo with West African lutes in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. Birth and death dates differ between sources in several cases, and where they do, both are given rather than the tidier one.
Forty-three American profiles, eleven scarce records, and sixteen stories the blues tells about itself — all of it built for listening, not scrolling.
