S. E. Rogie – African Lady LP 1st Pressing 1977 Palm Wine High Life Rare
$
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Description
S. E. Rogie – African Lady LP 1st Pressing 1977 Palm Wine High Life Rare
This is a very enjoyable sweet recording Palm Wine is loose and swinging
Sooliman Ernest Rogers "Rogie", (1926 – 4 July 1994) better known as S. E. Rogie, was a highlife and palm wine musician and guitarist from Sierra Leone
Palm-wine music (known as maringa in Sierra Leone) is a West African musical genre. It evolved among the Kru people of Liberia and Sierra Leone, who used Portuguese guitars brought by sailors, combining local melodies and rhythms with Trinidadian calypso to create a "light, easy, lilting style". It would initially work its way inland where it would adopt a more traditional style than what was played in coastal areas.
Highlife is a Ghanaian music genre that originated along the coastal cities of present-day Ghana in the 19th century, during its history as a colony of the British and through its trade routes in coastal areas. It encompasses multiple local fusions of African metre and western jazz melodies. It uses the melodic and main rhythmic structures of traditional African music, but is typically played with Western instruments. Highlife is characterized by jazzy horns and guitars which lead the band and its use of the two-finger plucking guitar style that is typical of African music. Recently it has acquired an uptempo, synth-driven sound
It would eventually gain popularity after Sierra Leone musician Ebenezer Calendar recorded songs in the 1950s and 1960s and continues to hold a small amount of that popularity.
Sooliman Ernest Rogers was born in 1926 in the town of Fonikoh, Pujehun District in Southern Province, Sierra Leone. His father was Mboima Kpaka, a community leader. Kpaka, which translates to Rogers, is both a surname and a reference to the Mandé peoples, which are one of the largest ethnic groups in the Sierra Leonean population. At the age of seven Rogie found himself having to make his own way in life, paying for basic schooling by cutting and selling firewood. Unable to pursue his education further due to lack of funds, by the 1940s he had moved to Freetown and was living with an elder brother whilst employed as an apprentice tailor. Amongst the clientele he encountered were musicians, which led to an interest in learning to play the guitar. After mastering both skills he set up his own travelling tailor's shop, and having earned money from this during the day, he would provide free musical entertainment at night. Almost completely self-taught, his musical development was influenced by established exponents of palm wine music, and also by his brother's gramophone records of US country and western musician Jimmie Rodgers, whose unusual pluckingstyle, vocals, and yodelling he liked to imitate. After being told incorrectly by a cousin that in the Kenyan Army he would be given the opportunity to study music in England or the United States, Rogie duly enlisted, but served only eleven months of the six years he signed up for. From 1952 to 1966 he then worked in the Accountant General's Office.
In the 1940s, he became a professional musician, singing in four languages, English, Krio, Mende, and Temne. His hits include "Koneh Pehlawo", "Please Go Easy with Me" and "My Lovely Elizabeth". In 1965 he formed a band called The Morning stars, but lost over half his financial investment in the venture when the musicians he assembled were made a better offer and left after just two months. In 1973, Rogie moved to the United States, where he settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and began using the surname "Rogie" as it sounded more African. There he performed at elementary and high schools across California, and received awards from the US Congress and Senate, the cities of Berkeley and Oakland, California.
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