Singing the Songs: Towards Elder S.K. Ampiah’s Lyrical Intent

It is truistic that every songwriter has an intent and purpose for composing any particular song. Unfortunately, there are some occasions where the users distort the songwriter's intent. Songs of Elder S.K. Ampiah, an iconic songwriter of Ghanaian Christian music, are no exception to the above phenomenon. It appears that the lyrics of some of his popular gospel songs have been distorted by Ghanaian gospel artistes, church singers, and the general populace. This paper, therefore, investigates and documents Elder S.K. Ampiah's lyrical intent of his selected popular gospel songs and postulates reasons for his choice of lyrics. Using interview, document, and audio review for data collection, a textual analysis of Elder S.K. Ampiah's selected popular gospel songs revealed that the distortion of his song lyrics usually does not alter the theme of the lyrics. However, it sometimes does not transmit or communicate the songwriter’s intent to the listener, ultimately defeating the song's purpose. This paper, therefore, recommends that recording artists and singers should as much as possible investigate and keep to the intent of the songwriter to ameliorate the problem of “lyrical distortion”.