{"id":3463,"date":"2026-11-04T17:40:01","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T17:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/?p=3463"},"modified":"2026-11-04T17:40:17","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T17:40:17","slug":"a-new-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/2026\/11\/04\/a-new-song\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Song"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A young man greeting me with curiosity and intensity<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

West African choirs are a joy to record. Each arrives with its own tribal style: its own dance moves, drum rhythms, percussion instruments, and lyrics rooted in local life. Tan gourds wrapped in a mesh of beads rattle in time with clapping hands. Bits of steel, pounded into dull gray thumb rings and tapped against rough-forged spoons, ring out high and piercing above the thunder of the drums. No two African choirs are alike, yet all share the same heartbeat: joy, proclamation, drums, and boundless energy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paster Matthew, a Mamprusi who has an important role in the movie the students are making.. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As smartphones have become more accessible and affordable across Africa, BiblePlus has shifted toward recording choirs on video. The audio plays on the cute yellow solar-powered Kulumi players used by BiblePlus, carrying beautiful, energetic music to off-grid communities in their own mother tongue. Tucked into a pocket or swinging from a lanyard around the neck, these little players keep women company through the strenuous rhythm of their days: hauling water, cooking over a smoky open fire, and pounding fufu. The men, bent to their labor in the yam, maize, millet, rice, and sugar cane fields under the hot sun, are glad for the music too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet when a moment of rest comes, in the cool shade of a sprawling tree and far from the blazing sun, the phones come out and the videos begin to play. Tiny BiblePlus microSD cards slip into those smartphones, each holding Gospel movies and a growing library of choir videos and testimonies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyrus, Clement, Beth, and I have done our best to capture these choirs with simple techniques and modest equipment. Last year in Nkwanta, we recorded several groups as they danced, sang, and drummed with joyful abandon. Young men and women stood shoulder to shoulder with deeply wrinkled elders<\/a>, praising the Lord together. But our knowledge and skills had reached a plateau. The choir videos were good, but we needed instruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The choir sets up beside a home<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Nashville Tennessee loves studios: hushed, controlled spaces lined with acoustic foam, studio microphones, massive video cameras, track lighting, and professional mixers. But the frontier where unreached peoples are eager to hear, ready to come and see, looks very different. In Africa, Asia, and South America, it is small churches with no electrical power and red-brown mud-hut compounds, where goats and chickens provide a free \u201clivestock audio track\u201d and mothers pause to nurse their babies. This is exactly where the Create Mobile team thrives. They don\u2019t merely tolerate difficult challenges; they go looking for them, traveling to places like Mongolia, Cambodia, and Malawi to bring the instruction to the students. We needed training, so they packed up their instructors and portable classroom and came to a community with no AC and only rustic accommodations. They even reshaped their four-week smartphone curriculum, adding two topics specifically to help advance BiblePlus for OneWay Africa: making videos that share the stories of people who have decided to follow Jesus, and recording African choirs that drum, dance, and praise. I\u2019m guessing our half-day lesson on recording a choir outside a mud-brick home, goats and all, was the first of its kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Issa and Eliya provide instruction to the students<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Cyrus gives Patrick some help with the camera<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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One of the choir leaders<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Music! Enjoy the choir: click the image below then move your mouse down<\/mark><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Watch the (silent drone) video below — a Komba dance and drum circle:<\/mark><\/em><\/strong> click the image below then move your mouse down<\/mark><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two men from Burkina Faso, and dancers from Chad and Nigeria:<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Reflecting on a Different Style<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Less than two months ago, I was traveling in France and took a couple of days to wander around Paris, savoring the timeless architecture and the well-worn limestone stairs that lead to hidden treasures for those willing to leave the crowds, to seek and observe. Maybe it is slow tourism, or maybe just contemplative strolling. One afternoon, I decided to visit \u00c9glise Saint-S\u00e9verin and take in its stained-glass windows. I had brought my prayer journal, intending to sit in the cool shadow of the towering Gothic stone walls and simply pray and write. But as I sat gazing up at the geometric beauty of the vaulted stone ceiling, I saw people settling into the small wooden chairs. They were smiling and chatting with each other, which was not exactly the quiet contemplation I had anticipated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I walked to the back of the church and noticed a few signs. A lay choir was about to practice. Africans and Europeans gathered into their assigned sections. A kind-faced young Frenchman led them through dramatic breathing and warm-up exercises that seemed almost like a caricature. As the choir rearranged chairs and singers, I returned to my journal and reflected on the upcoming work in Ghana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listen to the beautiful French choir: click the image below then move your mouse down<\/mark><\/em><\/strong><\/mark><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

West African choirs are a joy to record. Each arrives with its own tribal style: its own dance moves, drum rhythms, percussion instruments, and lyrics rooted in local life. Tan gourds wrapped in a mesh of beads rattle in time with clapping hands. Bits of steel, pounded into dull gray thumb rings and tapped against … Continue reading A New Song<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3463"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3507,"href":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463\/revisions\/3507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leopardshark.com\/ghana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}