When Akan rhythms, dances, and folks sound blended with the brass instruments and guitars of West African and Caribbean sailors, highlife music was born in the Gold Coast. A growing scholarship on highlife music attends to the genre's syncretic origins and continental popularity, but Nana Amoah-Ramey's book challenges academic androcentricity with a genealogy of women highlife performers in the twentieth century. With attention to highlife as both an artistic profession and subject of study, Amoah-Ramey considers how women performers navigated male dominance in the field, as well as the respectability politics that suffused daily life. With theoretical frameworks in Black feminist thought and standpoint epistemologies, Amoah-Ramey uses oral histories of women performers to create a scholarly archive of female performers of highlife music.

Highlife's origins can be traced to the interactions of colonial troops stationed in the Gold Coast during the interwar period. Indeed, one of the most persuasive arguments that Amoah-Ramey makes is to situate highlife's patriliny in its syncretic but militarized past. In traditional Akan dances and songs, women are prominent performers and lyricists, especially during puberty rites and ceremonies. Once these songs were mixed with regimented brass bands composed by European-trained musicians, women performers were excluded and, until the 1970s, female impersonators performed women's roles. Amoah-Ramey does not explain how women dancers and vocalists emerged at that point in highlife music, but suggests that the change reflects a flourishing of women's activism after President Nkrumah's inauguration of the National Council of Ghana Women. As highlife grew through town-based bands and vocal dance groups, it reached its most popular height in the 1970s. The ‘Queens of Highlife’ gained prominence just ahead of the genre's decline in the 1980s, when the Rawlings regime imposed nightly curfews and a tax on imported instruments, which instigated a musical recession.

In Chapters Two through Four, Amoah-Ramey details the effervescence of early independence, the festivity associated with highlife's popularity, and the role of apprenticeships in the cultivation of new musical talent. With attention to the narratives of twenty women highlife performers, Amoah-Ramey addresses issues of gender disparities in a strong effort to recover women's stories in popular music. Chapter Two posits that women musicians were rarely afforded frontrunner status due to the general stigma attached to nontraditional secular music. As a result, highlife musicians honed their skills through musical apprenticeships or church groups. Amoah-Ramey also explores how women artists used their social prominence to become band producers and songwriters. For example, queen mothers and women police officers leveraged their social statuses to gain access to the music industry and, as musicians, sang about women's issues in marriage and motherhood. In this chapter, as in others, Amoah-Ramey conducts discourse analyses of popular songs performed by women. This method reveals how artists such as Awurama Badu, Mam Bea, and Paulina Oduro used sophisticated stylistic overtures to challenge cultural perceptions of artists as ‘not serious persons’ and women artists, in particular, as wanton women of ‘low morals’ (23). Ghana's ethnic and class diversity makes it difficult to generalize about gender relations, but a more nuanced treatment of the way social location and class position informed these gender dynamics would have been helpful in this section.

Chapter Three is the strongest contribution of the book. In it, Amoah-Ramey shares the oral histories of several prominent women highlife musicians. Each personal story begins with a short introduction of how Amoah-Ramey gained access to participants and concludes with a note on how individual narratives importantly disrupt masculinist accounts of highlife music. The stories lay bare the hidden transcripts of gender inequity, where women describe their career successes and failures. Some musicians had the full support of their natal families — but then detail how their spouses squandered their earnings. Della Hayes formed the first ‘All Female Band’, which still enjoys a modicum of success through regular bookings (61). Other interviewees chronicle their parents’ anxieties about their marriage prospects, following on the heels of a musical career. In the chapter's conclusion, Amoah-Ramey summarizes the concurrent themes that run through each storyteller's narrative. In spite of the challenges that they faced, women performers felt empowered by their music and passionate about their creative talents. Amoah-Ramey speculates that education would lead to even greater achievements, but that assertion cannot be attributed to the data presented in the chapter. Another notable finding is that churches served as an important locus where women could learn music and develop their craft, but Amoah-Ramey expresses concerns about the way that congregational communities closed those opportunities once artists began to perform secular music. The author expresses surprise by this shift, although that sentiment seems a bit misplaced: Amoah-Ramey notes elsewhere that structural informalities, including those in the Ghanaian music industry more generally, persistently marginalized women artists.

Despite these limitations, which are a product of the breadth of time that Amoah-Ramey covers in the twentieth century, Female Highlife Performers in Ghana offers an important contribution to the scholarship on highlife music in Ghana. Ending with a hopeful note on the number of women performers able to financially sustain themselves solely through musical careers, the last two chapters situate highlife as a predecessor to more contemporary genres such as burger highlife, hiplife, and Twi-pop. The book's Conclusion offers an invitation for subsequent scholarly endeavours in reception studies and additional discourse analyses of song lyrics. The book has six appendices, which include black and white photos of interviewees, Twi transcriptions of popular songs by women artists, and English translations of those songs. This resource, too, will serve as an excellent inspiration for future scholarship.