045: Palm Wine Guitar Music: the 60's Sound, by S.E. Rogie

S.E. Rogie (Sierra Leone)
Palm Wine Guitar Music: the 60's Sound (1988)
12 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify (not in UK) · YouTube

Listening to palm wine music for the first time, it could be quite hard to pin on the map. Depending on who’s playing it, it has sounds from Trinidad, the US, Cuba, the Congo, Ghana or the UK. The world-spanning nature makes sense when you consider that it was the sound of the ports of Liberia and Sierra Leone, invented by sailors and dock workers who blended all the music they heard on their travels or were taught by passing-through foreigners, mixed with the traditional music of the region and played on guitars and beer bottle percussion (it was booze music, after all).

One of the stars of palm wine was Sooliman Ernest Rogers, better known as S.E. Rogie, and this compilation gives a nice succinct guide to his swingingest period. S.E. Rogie’s warm, deep voice and lovely finger-picking guitar gave him the ability to adapt palm wine to whatever he wanted it to be: he could use it to impart sage advice, have a good laugh or just make you rock around the joint. It worked stylistically too, because depending on what piece you listen to, it could be calypso or surf rock, highlife or jive. In fact, my favourite tracks on this compilation are ‘I Wish I Was a Cowboy’ and ‘A Time in My Life’ – as you can tell from the former's title, these are straight-up country songs. Sing them with a slightly different accent and they could be direct from Tennessee.

There’s just something about his music that is so sweet and cheerful, which is understandable when the songs are on partying, drinking and how in love you are (happy Valentine’s Day!), but quite a feat when the song is as unrelentingly bleak as ‘A Time in My Life,’ where he talks about a series of increasingly bad circumstances before contemplating suicide. But he manages it! Maybe it’s because the residue of palm wine alcohol is so firmly embedded in the wax that you’ll just end up grinning along through thick and thin.

Later in his life, Rogie also released an album on Real World Records, Dead Men Don’t Smoke Marijuana, which included guest musicians such as Danny Thompson on bass. It’s quite good, but it is definitely the album of an older gentleman, and doesn’t really have the same energy as this one. If you want to hear S.E. Rogie in his prime, twisting and crooning with the best of them (and recorded for a local audience, too), Palm Wine Guitar Music: the 60’s Sound is the one to go for.