John Collins is a naturalised Ghanaian who came to Ghana from Britain in 1952 and has been involved in the West African music scene since 1969. He is a guitarist, harmonica player and percussionist and has worked, recorded and played with numerous Ghanaian and Nigerian artists/ bands; the Jaguar Jokers, Francis Kenya, E.T. Mensah, Abladei, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Koo Nimo, Kwaa Mensah, Victor Uwaifo, Bob Pinodo, the Bunzus, the Black Berets, T.O. Jazz, S.K. Oppong, Atongo Zimba and Aaron Bebe Sukura. In the 1970’s Collins he ran own Bokoor highlife guitar band in James Town Accra which released twenty songs. In 1974 he played with the Bunzus Band at Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s African Shrine in Lagos and in 1977 Collins acted in Fela’s ‘Black President’ film.
In 1978 Collins presented the BBC External Service first ever series on African popular music called ‘In the African Groove’ and subsequently did forty other BBC broadcasts; as well as radio programs for the VOA and American Public Broadcasting, Radio Gabon, France Internationale, Radio Deutchevelle, Radio Netherlands and Radio stations in Ghana, Togo, Liberia, The Cote d’Ivoire, Canada, Denmark and Italy.
In 1979 Collins became an Executive Member of MUSIGA (Musicians Union of Ghana) and became their representative in early negotiations between them and international copyright organisations such as the PRS .That year and with some members of his Bokoor Band Collins went to the UK where they taught African music and Black Studies to West Indian youth at the Wolverhampton Council for Community Relations in Britain.
In 1982 and until the late 1990s Collins operated his Bokoor Recording Studio in Accra which recorded 200 bands and released 9 records and 60 commercial cassettes. Some of this material was later released on the World Music market; such as ‘Electric Highlife’ on the Hong Kong/USA Naxos label, ‘Vintage Palmwine’ and ‘Bokoor Beats’ on the Dutch Otrabanda label and the he ‘Guitar and Gun” released by Sterns/Earthworks of London
In the 1980s Collins made numerous lecture/workshop tours of Europe including giving the first presentation on African popular music at the launch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM] in Amsterdam in 1981; consequently in 1987 Collins was one of the local organisers for the International Conference that IASM held in Accra.
In 1990 Collins founded the Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation (BAPMAF) and in 1992 presented two papers. One was ‘Goombay/ Gome Music and the Roots of Highlife’ for the very first PANAFEST held at Cape Coast, and the other was ‘The Concert Party and the Ghanaian School Syllabus’ at the National Festival of Arts and Culture (NAFAC) held in Kumasi. From 1994 – 96 Collins was Technical Director of the University of Mainz/ University of Ghana project to re-copy and re-document the Institute of African Studies music archives.
Then in 1995 he began teaching at the Music Department of the University of Ghana and the following year opened his BAPMAF archives and Highlife Institute to the public at his late father’s Accra residence of Bokoor House. In 1996 he provided a once weekly series of talks on highlife history for Radio Gold and the following year he worked on a project with the University of Ghana’s Lower Volta Basin Research Project using local popular songs to educate children on the dangers of water-borne diseases.
Collins is also a music journalist and writer with over 100 journalistic and academic publications including twelve books on African popular and neo-traditional music published in the UK, USA, Germany, Holland, Ghana and Nigeria. Collins has also been a film consultant/facilitator: some of these are the BBC’s ‘Repercussions’, ‘Brass Unbound’ by Dutch IDTV, ‘The Highlife Story’ by Ghana Broadcasting, ‘When the Moment Sings’ by the Norwegian Visions Company, ‘Ghanaian Art Music’ by Bavarian TV, ‘One Giant Leap’ by Palm Pictures/Island Records and ‘African Cross Rhythms’ by the Danish Loki Films that was re-released 1996 as a college educational film called ‘Listen to the Silence’ by New Jersey Films for the Humanities & Sciences.
Collins obtained his first degree (Sociology and Archaeology) from the University of Ghana in 1972 and n 1994 his Doctorate in Ethnomusicology from the SUNY Buffalo. Over the years he has given lectures/workshop in Canada, the USA, UK, Scandinavia, Holland, Germany, France, the Caribbean, Ghana, Mali, South Africa and the Cote-D’Ivoire. He was also a resident research-fellow at the North-western University African Studies Department at Evanston in the US and Dartmouth Art College in the UK.
From 1991-7 Collins was a Trustee of the Ghana National Folklore Board then part of the Ghana Copyright Administration, and in the summer of 2000 Collins teamed up with fellow guitarist Koo Nimo for a performance tour of the American universities of Yale, Harvard, Wesleyan and Boston. In June the same year Collins presented a paper at the World Bank headquarters in Washington DC on the Music Industry in Six African Countries for the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Economic Network (PREN) Department. This was followed in 2003 with Collins being put on a short-term contract with the World Bank to prepare a working document (in consultation with the University of Ghana and four Ghanaian performance unions) on the needs of the Ghanaian a music industry.
In 2001 Collins was joint organiser of the French Embassy/BAPMAF/Harmathan two-week ‘Highlife Story’ celebration held at the Alliance Francais, and in February the following year Collins was organiser (with John Dysson) of joint US Public Affairs Section/ BAPMAF ‘Jazz Returns to Africa’ Black History Month lecture/concert series held at Accra’s National Theatre.
In 2005 Collins began teaching at New York University in Ghana and in February that year and as Chair of BAPMAF, Collins was co-director, with the US Embassy Public Affairs (David Queen & Sally Hodgson) and the Ghana African-American Association (Janet Butler) of the month-long ‘African American Heritage/Black History Month’
In 2006/7 Collins was a Consultant for the Ghana@Fifty Secretariat that organized the Ghana 50th Independence Celebrations in 2007, and in 2007-9 he became Research Associate with the University of Ghana’s Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy (CEGENSA) and provided them with 300 Ghanaian popular songs from the 1930s to the present that are relevant to gender issues.
For four years from 2007 Collins was member of the Board of the Royal Danish Embassy’s Ghanaian Fund for Development and Exchange and in 2009 he was co-convenor with the jazz musician/musicologist Doctor Mike White of the week-long the New York University Faculty Network Resource Seminar on ‘The African Roots of Jazz’. In 2011 he gave the paper ‘The Impact on Reggae and Caribbean Music on West African Music’ for the Rita and Bob Marley Foundation’s ‘Africa Unite Youth Symposium’ held at the University of Ghana, and in October 2013 Collins presented ‘Fela Kuti, Nkrumah and the Ghanaian Connection’ for the Fela Debates at NECA House in Lagos that was part of that years 2013 ‘Felabration Week’
After joining the Music Department of the University of Ghana in 1995 he was Department Head between 2003-5 and became a Full Professor in 2002. Between 2009 -2015 Collins was editor of the University’s of School of Performing Arts ‘Journal of Performing Arts’ and between 2010 and 2015 was a reviewer for the African Fellowship Competition of the African Humanities Program of the American Council of Learned Societies. Between 1997 and 2012 and out of the Music Department he co-ran (with Aaron Bebe Sukura) the Local Dimension highlife band that toured Europe in 2002, 2004 and 2006 and released a CD in 2003 entitled N’Yong on the French Disques Arion label.
In 2012 Collins became member of both the Technical and Steering Committee of a series of music industry meetings organised by MUSIGA in association with KPMG and the World Bank. This resulted in the statistical booklet being published in 2015 entitled ‘Revitalizing the Creative Art Industry: The Contribution of the Music Sector to the Socio–economic development of Ghana.’
It was in 2015 Collins retired from fulltime teaching at the University of Ghana Music Department and around this time for some years did occasional courses at Ashesi University.
On retiring from fulltime university work Collins decided to return to his earlier interest in archaeology that studied as a BA at Legon. Consequently he began collecting materials on the prehistory of African music and symbolic art . It was also in 2015 that Collins gave a lead paper at the Rex Jim Lawson International Highlife Music Conference, held at Nigeria’s University of Port Harcourt. The following years he gave the keynote speech on ‘Highlife The Evergreen’ at the O’Jez Restarant in Surulere, Lagos that honoured the veteran music journalist Benson Idonije and was organized by the Committee for Relevant Arts (CORA). It was also in 2016 that Collins donated a large amount of digitised BAPMAF materials to the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Music Archives of the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies, and at the same time had is first Nigerian book released, entitled ‘Highlife Giants: West African Dance Band Pioneers’ and published by Cassava Republic Press of Abuja.
In 2017 Collins became a member of the Ghana Association of Writers, (GAW) and the same year he was invited by Prof Sarah Wurz of the Archaeology Department Witwatersrand University to be on the committee of the graduate student Joshua Kumbani. In 2018 the first of Collins’ archaeological articles were published. These are ‘The Prehistoric Origins of Symbolic Intelligence in African Hominins: The Musilanguage’ in the University of Ghana’s Journal of Performing Arts (Vol. 5, No. 3), and ‘Symbolic Arts and Rituals in the African Middle Stone-Age’ in the UTAFITI Journal of the College of Humanities of the University of Dar es Salaam (Vol. 13, No.1). It was also in 2018 that Collins released the third edition of his 1994 and 1996 Ghanaian book Highlife Time, entitled ‘Highlife Time 3’ and published by Dakpabli Press of Accra
Since 2018 Collins has made several presentations, such as ‘The Prehistory of African Music Questions Racial Theories on the Origins of Human Intelligence’ for the Black History Month at the Dubois Memorial Centre, as well as talks on jazz and African music at the Alliance Francaise and the John Coltrane Jazz Club. He also spoke on the importance of music archives at the Annual Conference of the International Association of Sound and Audio-Visual Archives (IASA) held at the University of Ghana, and at the ‘Museum Conversations Symposium: Fragmented Dilemmas’ held at the Ghana National Museum. Most recent is his talk ‘Today’s Pop-music is Tomorrow’s Tradition’ for the Creative Arts Industry and Intellectual Property Workshop held at the Airport View Hotel in September 2019.
Collins recently completed collaboration with the American musicologist Dr. Colter Harper in digitising 100 hours of analogue studio-tapes from John Collins’s 1980-90s Bokoor Recording Studio. In 2019 some of these were ‘repatriated’ to the musicians involved, and a complete set of rough mixes were given to the University of Ghana’s J.H. Kwabena Nketia Music Archive for education and documentation on purposes
SOME OF JOHN COLLINS GHANAIAN AWARDS
1976: Received a grant for research into African music from the Authorship Development Fund of the Curriculum Division of the Ghana Teaching Service.
1987: Together with Prof. Nketia and Koo Nimo Collins was made an Honorary Life Member of International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM)
1998: Given the Ghana National ACRAG Arts Award at the National Theatre for thirty years pioneering research into highlife music and sixteen years of running the low-budget Bokoor Recording Studio.
2005: Given a Ghana Millennium Excellence Award (Arts Award) y.
2008: Was given an ACRAG Award for Popular Music at the National Theatre
2008: Collins was made a patron of MUSIGA, together with Professor Wille Anku and the veteran highlife musician Jerry Hansen
2013: Awarded a Ghana Music Honours by the Musicians Union Ghana MUSIGA at its Ghana Music Week held at the National Theatre,
2016: There was a panel in honour of Collins entitled ‘Praxis, Perspectives and Methods on Ghanaian Popular Music’ at the Ghana Studies Association Triennial Conference ‘Global Ghana’ that took place at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana
John Collins & Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation 