Abdul Tee-Jay - Palm Wine A Go-Go

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“When we entered the bar, the place was almost packed full. I was surprised but when I sat down my amazement grew even more. In the bar people were so strange, as I had never seen before. The group sitting around a man with one black eye seemed all made up of identical individuals. Each one had a black soar eye and an enormous black and blue lip. Firstly I thought they were all boxers. Then I realized that two of them had only one hand and that the first man had two missing fingers in his hand. He was wearing rings on the remaining three. They were talking loud but their voices could reach a loud volume in comparison to the movement of their respective mouths.

In front were two guys dressed up exactly in the same way, with an agbada full of designed fish. Both were wearing a small hat and dark glasses. I was convinced they were blind, but they spoke gesticulating as if they could see perfectly well. At another table was a small lonely man who had no thumbs and was completely bold. Besides him was a woman whose skin’s colour was more indigo than dark brown. She was continuously moving her shoulders without smiling nor saying one word. Madame Koto came to serve them.

What would you like to drink? Palm wine obviously, and your famous soup” (from The Famished Road by Ben Okri)


Palm wine is produced by the fermentation of the lymph obtained by cutting the trunk of the palm. It is a fresh drink, dense, whitish, acid and slightly alcoholic and is widely diffused in Africa , China and south Asia .

In Africa – mostly on the countries of the Guinean gulf – it is a very diffused drink and cheap and has become a daily habit traditionally and culturally for those people. The novel of Ben Okri "The Famished Road" rotates around Madame Koto’s palm wine bar. It is the place where hunger and debts are forgotten, where funny encounters occur, where one dances during parties, where prostitutes are found without a leg or with only one breast. But mostly it is the place where one finds the ogoro, the Nigerian palm wine poured from the calabasse into plastic coloured cups.

Palm wine music comes from the coasts of Sierra Leone and Liberia . It was the music of the krio, the creoles that as freed slaves were brought back to Africa from south America during the beginning of 800. The Creole musician would buy their guitars from the Portuguese sailors and would play a mix of traditional and Diaspora stylish music – first of all calypso – in the palm wine bars of Freetown and Monrovia.

Abdul Tee-Jay, whose real name is Tejan-Jalloh, comes from Sierra Leone and during the 80ies lead a dance band called Rokoto which mixed up dancing highlife with soukouss. He embraced the first guitar, that only had two strings when he was still a child. His heroes were in the bengining Ebanezer Calender and S.E. Rogie the star of palm wine music and only later Lord Kitchener – a Nigerian who played calypso in London where Abdul transferred in 1979 – and Harry Belafonte.

“I want to record this album to make palm wine music survive, my first love, because nobody is recording today that music. When I was a child palm wine music could be heard everywhere in Freetown and surroundings. Just outside of the city it was full of palm trees and people would sit beneath the trees and sing. They were not professionals, they would sing about life. Sometimes someone would bring a guitar, while someone else would keep the beat by beating a bottle”.

Palm Wine A Go Go tells about these inexperienced musicians under the palm trees, about bars and about the inebriation with which life would be celebrated and pain could be drowned, it tells about the simple and pleasant way of being together a way to lounge that does not mean wasting time.

“You will never see me again baby. A car passed by and you have gone. You’ll never see me again baby, you are too mean”. “If you want me you need to know how to cook. If you know how to cook then I will want you. Please don’t cook rubbish for me. Yes, yes don’t give me that bad medicine”. “Who stole my chicken? I had 24, but now I count . . . two, four, eight, twenty four . . . no they are only twenty three.”

Abdoul plays all instruments. The acoustic guitar, percussions and the thumb piano that in Sierra Leone is called kongoma. The chorus formed by Tess Deloes and Alimany Kamara replies to his singing.

And his a small masterpiece, nostalgic of a vanished treasure, a sweet and light music, that makes you want to be in one of those bars where fresh palm wine is served, one talks and listens to music under the shade sheltering from the sun. Palm wine like a medicine for the tired souls, as a space where one appreciates what we are without suffering for what we are unable to be. Palm Wine A Go-Go.


Author: Abdoul Tee-Jay
Title: Palm Wine A Go-Go
Year: 2003
Label: Far Side Music

Listen Tracks:
1. Cee O Ley Ley
2. Oh Yando
3. Polo-Lo