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Steven Friedson is a research professor of music and anthropology and head of the ethnomusicology program at the University of North Texas. For several decades he has been conducting comparative research on music and ritual in Africa. His initial work in northern Malawi takes a phenomenological approach to musical experience in traditional diagnostics and therapeutics among the Tumbuka-speaking peoples. This was followed by a long-term research project in the Volta Region of Ghana, studying one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast, a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the Northern Region of the country.

Obo Addy (1936 – 2012), from Accra, Ghana, was a drummer and dancer and one of the first native African musicians to bring the fusion of traditional folk music and Western pop music known as worldbeat to Europe and the Pacific Northwest of the United States during the late 1970s. He taught music at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.