Ussher Town
Around Ussher Fort, with Jamestown lighthouse a short walk away.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Arts & Music · Ussher Town, Accra · 1919–1996
By day he dispensed medicine. By night he stood in front of the Tempos with a trumpet or a saxophone, and the dance floors of Accra, Lagos and Freetown filled. Emmanuel Tettey Mensah took highlife, the music of Gold Coast brass bands and palm-wine guitarists, mixed it with swing, jazz and Caribbean calypso, and turned it into the sound of a continent getting ready for freedom. He wrote the song Ghana danced to on independence night, jammed with Louis Armstrong, and was carried on a stool as King of Highlife. He came from the old streets of Ussher Town, between the forts and the sea.
Emmanuel Tettey Mensah was born on 31 May 1919 in Ussher Town, the old Ga quarter of central Accra that grew up around the Dutch fort, Ussher Fort, next to Jamestown and its lighthouse. It was a town of fishermen, traders and brass bands.
At the Government School he learned the flute, and around 1932 a teacher named Joe Lamptey, who had turned his school fife band into the Accra Orchestra, took him on as piccolo player. He soon moved to the saxophone, then trumpet and organ. With his elder brother Yebuah he formed the Accra Rhythmic Orchestra, which in 1939 won the Lambeth Walk dance-band competition at the King George Memorial Hall, the building now known as the Old Parliament House.
Music did not look like a career. Mensah trained in pharmacy at the medical school in Accra, at what is now Korle Bu, qualified in 1943, and was posted as a government dispenser to Ashanti, where he played with the Kumasi Philharmonic. Later he opened his own pharmacy in Accra, and it was that shop's income that allowed him to buy instruments and keep his own band.
The original Tempos were formed in Accra in 1946 as a jam-session band by European soldiers and local musicians, playing for army dances and at the Accra Club. As the soldiers went home, African musicians took their places. Mensah joined in 1947, alongside the drummer Guy Warren, later known as Kofi Ghanaba, who had played with Afro-Cuban musicians abroad and came back with the latest calypso and jazz records.
When the band broke up around 1950, Mensah rebuilt it under his own name as E. T. Mensah and the Tempos. From 1952 they recorded for Decca, and their records sold across English-speaking West Africa.
Before Mensah, highlife meant brass bands playing for chiefs and funerals, palm-wine guitar in the villages, and large orchestras in evening dress playing foxtrots for the colonial elite. Mensah brought them together: highlife melodies and African percussion, jazz horns, a Cuban rhythm section with congas and bongos, and later electric guitars. He sang in Ga, Twi, Fante, English and pidgin, so that the same record worked in Accra, Kumasi, Lagos and Freetown.
His best-known songs include "All for You", "Day by Day", "Sunday Mirror" and the "Inflation Calypso", a joke about rising prices that people still recognise. The full story of the music is on our page on highlife, hiplife and afrobeats.
Highlife was the soundtrack of the independence movement, and Mensah was close to it. He wrote many songs in support of Kwame Nkrumah, played at CPP rallies, and travelled with him on state visits. For independence in 1957 he composed and recorded "Ghana Freedom Highlife", which celebrated the end of colonial rule and was danced to across the country on the night of 6 March.
Satchmo in Accra: when the American trumpeter Louis Armstrong visited the Gold Coast in the mid-1950s (sources give 1956 or 1957), the Tempos played with him. The meeting of the King of Highlife and the king of jazz became part of Accra legend.
In the 1960s and 1970s newer styles, from soul to guitar-band highlife and Afrobeat, took the dance floors, and the big dance bands faded. But Mensah was never forgotten. He was enstooled, carried on a stool in the Ghanaian way, as the King of Highlife, and became the first president of the Musicians Union of Ghana. In the 1980s a new generation rediscovered his records, and reissues introduced him to listeners in Europe and America.
E. T. Mensah died at Mamprobi in Accra on 19 July 1996, aged 77.
Around Ussher Fort, with Jamestown lighthouse a short walk away.
Once the King George Memorial Hall, where his first band won its competition.
Highlife nights and concerts still happen here and in the bars of Osu and Jamestown.
Where Ghana danced to "Ghana Freedom" on independence night.
E. T. Mensah did for Ghanaian popular music what Ephraim Amu did for its choirs: he showed that African rhythm and language could stand beside anything the world had to offer. He was a pharmacist who treated music as a serious craft, a bandleader who made one Ghanaian style the common language of West Africa's dance floors, and a patriot who put independence to a beat. His music was also the party's music, close to Nkrumah and the CPP. But more than any speech, it was his highlife that made freedom something people could dance to.
Verified: 29 September 2026. His birth in Ussher Town on 31 May 1919, the Accra Orchestra under Joe Lamptey, the 1939 Lambeth Walk competition at the King George Memorial Hall, his pharmacy qualification in 1943, his joining the Tempos in 1947 and later leadership of the band, the 1949 Nigeria visit, the Decca recordings from 1952, "Ghana Freedom Highlife" in 1957 and his death at Mamprobi on 19 July 1996 follow Wikipedia, GhanaWeb, RetroAfric and the Fondation Langlois collection. The date of the Louis Armstrong meeting varies between 1956 and 1957 in sources and is given as such. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.