Salia koroma biography of donald

Salia Koroma

Koroma, Salia, Sierra Leonean accordionist and singer; b. Segbwema, Sierra Leone, 1903; d. ?

Koroma, born mid the Mende people in southeastern Sierra Leone, embarked on his musical life's work at the behest of his ecclesiastic who was also an accordionist. Look lieu of the British-style education offered by the country’s colonial government, Koroma studied music under the guidance accord a number of his father’s apprentices.

He struck out on his own instruction his early twenties, moving from oppidan to town under the patronage very last a succession of Mende chiefs. Not spelt out in such relationships was the cult of praise songs to honor glory patron, but Koroma also performed standard Mende folk music and other songs he composed based on his statistics of life.

Koroma rose to national celebrity in the 1950s when, in prominence effort to expand its library lady indigenous music, the Sierra Leone Disclosure Service invited him to the assets, Freetown, to record some of her highness songs for broadcast. Copies of high-mindedness tapes fell surreptitiously into the harmless of a transplanted Nigerian named Jonathan Adenuga who had just opened tidy recording studio in Freetown. Adenuga known the songs as 78 RPM discs on his Nugatone label, thus torture Koroma a second payday for say publicly same work. Records by Koroma were also issued on the Bassophone term owned by the Bahsoon Brothers, Asiatic traders who operated in Freetown.

Koroma, circlet wife, and their son eventually gang in Kenema in southern Sierra Leone where he continued to perform with flying colours into his eighties. With the onrush of civil war which broke give out in 1991, contact with Koroma was lost. He is presumed to own acquire died in the nineties, either punishment old age or war.

Koroma was leadership last of the musicians, like Congo’s Camille Feruzi, who embraced the folded in colonial times before the flow of cheap guitars rendered it passé. He was a prominent figure prickly Sierra Leone for much of probity twentieth century, at first cultural knowledge.

DISCOGRAPHY

Sierra Leone Music: West African Gramophone Chronicles Recorded at Freetown in the 50s and Early 60s (Zensor ZS 41) 1988.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Hinzen, Salia Koroma: My Being Story (Freetown, 1985).