Gospel Stars
The vast majority of recorded gospel music in Ghana is synth-based pop published on cassettes, a variety of digital media, and blasted over the airwaves. While she may be out of fashion by now, in 2008 when I Have My Liberty! was recorded, one of the reigning queens of Ghanaian gospel was Esther Smith. Making pop gems with auto-tuned vocals while T-Pain was still in his bedroom dreaming of top-hatted stardom, these productions are sweet treats - albeit quite different in execution from what one might hear in a local church.
For some auto-tune lite action check out “Adze-Ko” from Esther Smith’s album Gye No Di. This album is available for download via Awesome Tapes from Africa along with some great background text. And for curious minds a little Ghanaian celebrity gossip to round out the pop experience.
…and please, just try to deny this one, he’s got the awards to prove it:
Great Grace Church Welcomes You
Great Grace Church Assemblies of God Church sits in the suburbs of Accra surrounded by the growing pains of middle class development. From it’s concrete platform the view is West African McMansion foundations on dirt roads lined with dry goods stalls, a common and prolonged state of much of the cities suburbs.
Like it’s neighborhood, Great Grace Church feels upwardly mobile. The congregation is jovial but reserved, participating but with hesitance in some. The band is tight and practiced, led by a musical director and three coordinated and strong singers. Multiple preachers lead the service, each with a specific and choreographed dramatic role. There is one to narrate with inspiring stories of prosperity, one to explain the pressing administrative matters of the day, and one whose voice is distorted to an indecipherable state, slipping in a out of spoken tongues. In coordination with the band, it’s this last voice that lifts the service towards the other worldly and gradually transports the middle class congregation to a less inhibited state. In a late moment of one service, I heard a voice behind me, turned my microphone and recorded this impromptu speech:
