Music I - Jùjú, Àpàlà, Wéré and Fújì

Yoruba popular music is one of the most continuously productive traditions in Africa, and it has a documented lineage. Jùjú begins in Lagos in the 1920s in a specific neighbourhood among a specific group of people. Àpàlà and wéré come out of Muslim Yoruba practice, wéré specifically from the Ramadan wake-up music. Fújì comes out of wéré. Afrobeat comes out of highlife and American funk, and is treated in the file that follows. Almost every genre is traceable to a named originator, a place and a decade, which is unusual and is a consequence of the recording industry arriving in Lagos early.

The constant across all of them is the talking drum and the practice of oríkì. A Yoruba popular singer in any of these genres is performing a version of praise poetry, naming patrons and their lineages in performance, and the economics of the music has always depended on the sprayed money that praise brings. That is the through-line from Túndé King in 1936 to a fújì performance in Lagos this year.

Jùjú

Túndé King (born 1910)

Jùjú originated in the Olówógbowó area of Lagos in the 1920s, among the Sàró and Lagos Muslim working population, and Túndé King is credited with naming and first recording it 1.

He was born on 24 August 1910 1. He is credited with coining the word jùjú, in reference to the small tambourine-like drum used in his ensemble, a Brazilian-derived instrument that entered Lagos with the Agùdà returnee community, and with making the first jùjú recording in 1936 1. The early ensemble was small: a singer with a banjo or guitar, the jùjú tambourine, and a sẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀ gourd rattle.

The word has nothing to do with the English usage of "juju" for African magic, and the confusion has caused a great deal of nonsense to be written about the genre. It is an onomatopoeic name for a drum.

Ayìndé Bákàrè (1912 to 1972)

Bákàrè apprenticed himself to Túndé King's band and began performing around 1935, first recording on His Master's Voice in 1937 2. He is the figure who brought the electric guitar and the amplified band into jùjú, and who moved it from a small acoustic ensemble towards the larger group that the later stars used. He died on 1 October 1972 2.

Isaiah Kẹ́hìndé Dàiró (1930 to 1996)

I. K. Dàiró is the most important jùjú musician of the independence period and the one who made the genre a national music 3.

He was born in 1930 and died on 7 February 1996 3. In the years around independence in 1960 he was the country's most prominent and influential jùjú musician 3. Two innovations are his. He brought the accordion into jùjú, which gave the music the melodic line that defines the era's sound. And he brought a full battery of Yoruba talking drums into the band, restoring the drum language that the guitar-led earlier style had thinned out.

He was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, unusually for a Nigerian popular musician, and in 1969 he co-founded STAR Records with Harúnà Iṣọ̀lá, described as the first African record label owned by its artists 4. That is a significant fact about the Nigerian industry: the two biggest sellers in two different genres tried to solve the ownership problem themselves in 1969.

Ebenezer Ọbẹ́y (born 1942)

Ọbẹ́y was born Ebenezer Rẹ̀mílẹ́kún Arẹ̀mú Ọlásupọ Ọbẹ́y-Fábíyì on 3 April 1942 at Ìdògò in Ògùn State, of Ẹ̀gbá Yoruba descent 5. He moved to Lagos in the mid-1950s, trained under Fatai Rolling-Dollar, and founded the International Brothers in 1964, which became the Inter-Reformers Band in the early 1970s, recording for West African Decca 5.

His style, which he called mílíkì, is slower and more conversational than his main rival's, built around the guitar and around lyrics that are essentially sung proverbs. That is the substance of his reputation: he is the jùjú artist whose lyrics are Yoruba moral instruction, and a large part of the proverb repertoire of ordinary Yoruba speech has been reinforced through his records. He expanded the ensemble with additional drum kits, guitars and talking drums 5.

From the early 1990s he moved to gospel music and evangelism, and he is an ordained minister 5. He is a Member of the Order of the Federal Republic and continues to perform 5.

King Sunny Adé (born 1946)

Sunny Adé is the Yoruba musician who took jùjú to a world audience, and the one whose band was the most technically ambitious.

He was born Sunday Adéníyì Adégẹ̀yẹ on 22 September 1946 at Òṣogbo, into a family with royal connections to Ondó and Àkúrẹ́, and holds the title Ọmọba 6. He formed the band that became the African Beats in 1967 6.

He signed to Island Records in 1982, and Juju Music (1982) and Synchro System (1983) established him internationally 6. Island had lost Bob Marley in 1981 and was explicitly looking for a successor as a global star from outside the Anglo-American market; Sunny Adé was that attempt, and while he did not reach Marley's scale, the records introduced Yoruba music to a large Western audience. Synchro System made him the first Nigerian nominated for a Grammy 6. He was nominated again in 1998 for Odu.

Musically his contribution is the expansion of the ensemble to twenty or more players with multiple guitars in interlocking parts, a full talking drum section, and the introduction of the pedal steel guitar and synthesiser into jùjú 6. The pedal steel, borrowed from American country music and played in a Yoruba idiom, is his signature and has no parallel elsewhere in African music. He was inducted into the Afropop Hall of Fame in 2009 6.

The Ọbẹ́y and Sunny Adé rivalry through the 1970s and 1980s is the defining commercial contest in Yoruba music and is still argued about. The usual formulation is that Ọbẹ́y is the philosopher and Sunny Adé the musician, which is unfair to both but captures the difference in emphasis between lyric and arrangement.

Àpàlà, wéré and waka: the Muslim Yoruba genres

Àpàlà, wéré and waka come out of Yoruba Muslim practice and are the counterpart tradition to jùjú, which was Christian and Lagos-elite in origin. Àpàlà uses agogo bells, talking drums and the agidigbo thumb piano and deliberately excludes Western instruments. Wéré, also called ajísáàrì, is the music performed to wake the faithful for the pre-dawn meal during Ramadan, and it is the direct ancestor of fújì.

Harúnà Iṣọ̀lá (1919 to 1983)

Iṣọ̀lá is the master of àpàlà, the artist usually called its father, and one of the largest-selling African recording artists of his era.

He was born in 1919 and died in 1983 4. Sources differ on his birthplace, with the Ìjẹ̀bú-Ìgbò and Ìbàdàn attributions both current; his family is Ìjẹ̀bú. He began recording àpàlà around 1955 and became the dominant artist of the genre 4. Ọ̀rókí Social Club (1971) sold over five million copies on Decca, a figure at the top of anything achieved in African popular music at the time, and its title track praises a nightclub in Òṣogbo where he performed extended sets 4. He co-founded STAR Records with I. K. Dàiró in 1969 4. His son Musiliu Harúnà Iṣọ̀lá continues in the genre 4.

The other major àpàlà figure is Ayínlá Ọmọ́wúrà (about 1933 to 1980), an Abẹ́òkúta artist who sang for and about the urban poor, whose lyrics were sharper and more confrontational than Iṣọ̀lá's, and who was killed by his own band manager in 1980. His posthumous standing among Yoruba listeners is very high and he is the subject of a substantial recent biography and a 2021 film.

Salawa Abẹ́ni (born 1961)

Salawa Abẹ́ni is the leading figure in waka, a genre performed by Muslim Yoruba women.

She was born Salawa Abẹ́ni Alidu on 5 May 1961 at Epe in Lagos State, an Ìjẹ̀bú Yoruba from Ìjẹ̀bú Waterside in Ògùn State 7. Her debut album, released on Leader Records in 1976 when she was fifteen, became the first recording by a female artist in Yoruba to sell over a million copies in Nigeria 7. The Aláàfin of Ọ̀yọ́, Lámídì Adéyẹmí III, crowned her Queen of Waka Music in 1992 7. She was married to the fújì musician Kollington Ayinla 7.

Her predecessor in the genre, Batile Alake of Ìjẹ̀bú, is the artist who brought waka out of purely religious performance into commercial recording in the 1950s and 1960s and who introduced the drum ensemble to it.

Fújì

Fújì is the dominant popular music of Yoruba Muslim life, and it is the genre with the largest live audience in Yorubaland.

Ṣikirú Ayìndé Barrister (1948 to 2010)

Barrister created fújì and named it.

He was born Sikiru Ọlọ́ládé Ayìndé Balógun on 9 February 1948 in Ìbàdàn and died on 16 December 2010 at St Mary's Hospital, London 8. He began performing in 1965 8. His innovation was to take wéré, the Ramadan wake-up music, and build it into a year-round commercial genre with a full percussion ensemble, no guitars, and vocals that carry Islamic praise, Yoruba oríkì and social commentary together. He took the name fújì after seeing a poster advertising Mount Fuji in Japan, a detail he confirmed repeatedly and which has no deeper significance than that he liked the sound of the word 8.

He released over seventy studio albums, toured Britain from 1978 and then the United States, and is the acknowledged source for every subsequent fújì artist 8. His rivalry with Kollington Ayinla was long, public and commercially productive for both.

Kollington Ayinla (born 1949 or later)

Kollington is the co-founder of the genre and Barrister's principal rival. Sources give his birth as 20 August 1949, with 1952 and 1953 also appearing, and he is from Ilota near Ìlọrin in what is now Kwara State, a Yoruba-speaking area within the northern administrative region 9. He came to fújì from the army, and the military bearing and the bàtá-heavy sound are his signature. He was married to Salawa Abẹ́ni 9.

K1 De Ultimate (born 1957)

Wasiu Ọmọgbọ́lahàn Olásunkànmi Adéwálé Ayìndé Marshal, known as King Wasiu Ayìndé Marshal and now as K1 De Ultimate, was born on 3 March 1957 10. He was a member of Barrister's Supreme Fuji Commanders from 1975 to 1978 and took the name Ayìndé with his mentor's permission 10. He developed the style known as Talazo fújì, which is smoother, more melodically arranged and more accommodating of keyboards and studio production than Barrister's, and it is the version of fújì that carried the genre to a middle-class and non-Muslim audience 10.

He is the most commercially successful fújì artist of the last three decades and the most politically connected, which is a live subject of comment in Nigeria.

Later fújì

Wasiu Alabi Pasuma and Saheed Osupa are the leading figures of the generation after K1, and their rivalry, and the associated disputes over the title of King of Fuji, has structured the genre since the 1990s. Fújì remains the music of Yoruba social ceremony, the owanbe party, and its economy runs on live performance and sprayed money rather than on recording, which is why its scale is invisible in streaming figures and very visible in Lagos on any Saturday.