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How to acquire historical erudition; provenance of information and unreliable information; tactics of approach; greetings and sacrifices; sources for the work
Unreliability and differences of sources
Differences in drumming knowledge
Continued learning throughout life
Necessity of sacrifices, greetings, and giving respect
John should continue greeting senior drummers
The drum chiefs as sources for the origins talks
Every knowledge has a father.
It is good if you ask somebody a question, and the fellow knows it, and he is able to tell you he knows it.
Everyone with his teacher, and everyone with his father.
If you eat food in a house with a lot of witches, you won't know the one who killed you.
If you are coming to ask any learned person a question, ask him the question straight.
You have to take sense and patience when you are searching for knowledge.
The one who refuses work is better than the one who spoils it.
No one knows everything in drumming.
Everyone has the extent he has asked.
As for wisdom, we only measure it.
All talks have their ends.
The talks of drumming have no end, and nobody learns all of drumming.
A stranger can never know the old guinea corn food.
Everybody knows his town's talks.
We say that you have to lower yourself down before you pick something up. If you want to search for wisdom, you have to reduce yourself, and take yourself to be a slave.
You can only bend a fish when it is wet. If the fish becomes dry, can you bend it again?
And any work you do, you have to look to God.
How a sacrifice is: you are looking at God.
If you go to look for wisdom, you shouldn't say that no one should cheat you.
The time you come to know that someone is cheating you, if you say it, that is the time you can no longer get what you want from him.
The water the fish comes out from is the same water that cooks it.
If you are a drummer who wants to learn more, the problem that you have, the answer is in your own skin.
If you want something, it will come from your own skin.
If you need a soothsayer, and the soothsayer is a cripple, you have to go and carry him to where you need him.
If you are holding your hand with your fingers closed, you will never get what you want. But whenever you open it wide, then you can get what you want.
Drummers use proverbs to do work.
The one who knows how to pet a rich man, he is the one who will inherit the rich man's property.
As for a dog, you will get a dog and put it down before they burn the bush.
A woman does not say “Thank-you” to the one who screws her.
If someone wakes you up in the night, you don't have to ask him, “Who are you?”
Shyness is a human being.
A drummer is an old person.
Shame: if you put a person into too much shame, what he didn't want to tell you, he will tell you.
If you are going to start some work tomorrow, then the work should start this evening.
Truly, a person doesn't leave his house.
They don't cross over the legs of a householder to enter into the room.
The tongue: can you count it inside fighting? You cannot count it like that, but it is inside fighting.
In Dagbon here, we don't take rope and tie a person. We take a thread and tie him.
If we are going to talk about these old talks, our talk should have a father.
Very old people have no time to say many things.
You should try to take a stone and throw it inside a well and hear the sound.