Music historians have traced origin sounds of Afrobeat in Ghana and Nigeria as early as the 1920s but most people would mark the birth of the genre to the 1960s. As it morphed into a looser style called Afrobeats
The show had 11 Tony nominations. FELA! and was produced by notables such as Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and Will & Jada Pinkett-Smith. Fela! reinvigorated Afrobeat and ultimately lead to the emergence of an entirely new genre, “Afrobeats” in 2010.