An Eclectic Reflection on Daddy Lumba's Music Legacy as a Voice of Ghanaian Sociocultural Worldview

Music serves as a profound sonic archive, giving voice to a people’s collective philosophy, memory, and social reality. However, scholarly discourse on Ghanaian music remains constrained by a binary paradigm that laments the erosion of tradition or critiques the corrosion of modernity, creating an analytical impasse. This study addresses this gap by positing the three-decade legacy of Daddy Lumba as a paradigm of syncretic curation, a conscious, selective process of artistic adaptation where cultural continuity is actively renewed. Employing a qualitative, intrinsic case study design, the research analysed two primary data sources comprising digitally aggregated census of Daddy Lumba’s discography, and semi-structured interviews with 35 hetrogenous, purposively sampled participants. The song lyrics and interview transcripts were analysed through an integrated framework of Reflexive Thematic Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. This approach yielded three key findings: Lumba’s proverbial lyrics articulate a hermeneutic philosophy for navigating existential and social modernities; his ‘Burger Highlife’ sound embodies a rooted cosmopolitanism, strategically synthesising traditional Highlife with global pop to bridge generations; and his music has achieved canonical status through ritual ‘musicking,’ becoming indispensable to weddings, funerals, and worship, thus ensuring its trans mission as embodied cultural memory. The study concludes that Lumba’s oeuvre is not a symptom of decay but a dynamic, living archive that vigorously reinvents the Ghanaian sociocultural worldview. It recommends comparative analyses using this syncretic model, for instance, of other iconic Ghanaian and African popular musicians, to further illuminate the strategic role of artists as agents of cultural negotiation, promotion, and preservation.