The Performers: Who Makes This Art
How Yoruba oral artists are trained, which genres are open to whom, how gender divides the field, how performers are paid, and the named artists the scholarship documents.
Yoruba oral literature is made by identifiable people with names, training, careers and bills. This file is about them: how competence is acquired, who is permitted or expected to perform which genre, how gender divides the field, how the money works, and which artists the scholarly record actually names.
A preliminary distinction. Some genres are everyone's: àlọ́, orin, the ordinary use of proverbs. Some are restricted by membership: ìrèmọ̀jé requires the hunters' guild, ẹ̀sà requires the Egúngún society, ìyẹ̀rẹ̀ Ifá requires babaláwo training. Some are open but professionalised: rárà, ìjálá and drumming, where anyone might learn but a few make a living. And one, ẹkún ìyàwó, is performed once in a lifetime by every woman who marries traditionally.
How competence is acquired
There is no institution and no certificate. The mechanisms are three, and they overlap.
Heredity. The clearest case is drumming. Àyàn is the òrìṣà of drumming and drumming belongs to Àyàn lineages, whose members carry Àyàn-compounded names, and yoruba-drum-language treats this in detail. The Egúngún lineages are similar: ẹ̀sà is chanted exclusively by members of the society, so the genre travels with descent. Where a genre belongs to a lineage, the child of that lineage begins absorbing it before any deliberate teaching starts.
Apprenticeship. In the general Yoruba apprenticeship system, the apprentice is ọmọ-ìkọ́ṣé and the completion of training is gbà-àyè ìkọ́ṣé, to receive freedom, a graduation . Would-be musicians are taken through intensive training whose scope, duration, syllabus, philosophy and content are set by the master . The three routes into music are given as heredity, apprenticeship under a well-known master, and observation, imitation and participation in musical activity . Drummer training involves periods of apprenticeship with rewards for doing well and the reverse for doing badly, and the scholarship notes that Àyàn leadership development is generally informal, unstructured and undocumented . That last observation is worth holding: the system works, and it does not write anything down, which is why precise statements about training duration and curriculum are hard to source and are not made here.
Immersion and rote. For the non-professional genres, learning is by exposure and repetition. Ẹkún ìyàwó is learnt over months and years of a girl's unmarried life by rote, sometimes with a hired professional wailer engaged to train the bride and the other girls in the family who will marry soon . Isola's observation is the widest statement of the principle: from the very first day of their lives Yoruba children hear poetry performed, usually a grandmother or another woman welcoming the new arrival by chanting the family oríkì, and during childhood instruction proceeds through literature .
Two supplementary practices appear in the record and should be reported rather than smoothed. First, memory aids: girls learning ẹkún ìyàwó are sometimes given preparations intended to strengthen recall and to give boldness before adversaries, in the way a masquerade chanter fortifies himself . Second, the counter-claim, that ẹkún ìyàwó requires no formal training or pupillage at all, mastery coming from continuous practice and repetition . Both are in the literature and the disagreement is left standing.
Criticism and quality control
The absence of institutions does not mean the absence of standards.
The mechanism is public performance before a knowledgeable audience. Hunters' festivals function as occasions at which skilled chanters present, participants learn from one another, and chanting is submitted to the criticism of older chanters . Babalola's account of ìjálá sets out the standards by which composition and performance are judged , which is to say the tradition has an articulated critical vocabulary.
What is judged, across genres: vocal control in the genre's own mode, so the ìjálá chanter's unforced relaxed voice ; the size and aptness of the performer's stock of oríkì; responsiveness to who is present; and originality within a corpus the audience already knows. Kolawole's formulation of the last is that there is nothing new in a performance whose text is already familiar, so the artist's ability to make the old material fresh is what makes the difference before an audience that is both respondent and judge . He also notes the constraint: if the performer deviates unnecessarily, his verbal art is considered out of place and he is at the audience's mercy .
Gender
The field is gendered by genre, and the pattern is not the one a reader might expect.
Women hold central genres. Barber's finding in Òkukù is that oríkì, the master discourse of the whole system, is performed mainly by women, and that women hold and interpret the corpus . Since oríkì is the raw material of most other genres, this places a large share of the tradition's knowledge with women. Ẹkún ìyàwó is exclusively female. The oríkì that welcomes a newborn is chanted by a grandmother or another woman . The Oroyeye abuse songs documented by Apter are performed by women, young women at night and elder female cult custodians by day, and the elder women's licence to name wrongdoers is a form of political authority .
Men hold the guild and lineage genres. Ìjálá and ìrèmọ̀jé belong to the hunters, who are men. Ẹ̀sà belongs to the Egúngún society. Drumming belongs to the Àyàn lineages and is overwhelmingly male. Ifá chanting is predominantly, though not exclusively, male, and yoruba-becoming-a-babalawo treats the ìyánífá question.
Rárà is contested in the record. Rárà chanting for kings and the wealthy is often described as male, while the genre's own offshoot ẹkún ìyàwó is female, and Barber's oríkì finding cuts across the description. The honest position is that performance roles are gendered by occasion and by locality while the material is shared, and that a general claim either way is not supportable from the sources consulted here.
Barber's most consequential observation on gender is structural rather than statistical. In Òkukù, oríkì are performed mostly by women and ìtàn, the narratives that explain what the oríkì allude to, are recounted mostly by elderly men, so that the production of textual meaning is divided between two institutionally separate genres held by two different groups . Neither group holds the complete text. That is a division of intellectual labour rather than a hierarchy, and it means a full account of a lineage's past requires both.
Patronage and payment
Praise performance has always been paid, and the payment shapes the art.
The relationship is direct: the performer is rewarded by the person praised. Barber's account of an oríkì performance has the performer in an intense dyadic relationship with the addressee, exhorting, blessing and thanking, and switching to a new subject when a more important personality enters the performance space . The economics are visible in the performance itself.
The same holds for drummers. A talking drummer's standing with an audience depends on his mastery of praise names with which to eulogise the people present, and drummers gifted in this receive material and monetary gifts . Rárà is rendered principally for entertainment and, on occasion, for appreciation and remuneration among the kindred community .
Two consequences.
It shapes the text. Who is praised, at what length, and in what order is decided partly by who is paying and by rank. This is not corruption of the form; it is the form. But a reader treating a transcribed praise performance as a neutral record of a lineage's history should factor in who commissioned it.
It does not license flattery. The Ẹ̀ṣọ́ Ìkòyí case in file 04 shows a paid performer obliged to chant the lineage's warmongering and looting because those lines are part of the established repertoire, and the audience does not take offence because they belong to the corpus . Payment buys performance, not editorial control.
Beyond the individual transaction there was institutional patronage. The arọ́kin were court chroniclers attached to royal households, and Crowther's 1852 dictionary records the ológbò as a royal counsellor who also acted as chronicler and narrator of ancient traditions, with the proverb Ológbò bàbá arọ́kin, Ologbo is the father of the chroniclers . yoruba-oriki treats these offices.
The named artists
The scholarly record names fewer performers than it should, and this is a real deficiency in the field: for most published texts, the chanter is unnamed while the collector is credited. The following are documented.
Ògúndáre Fóyánmu (Ògbómọ̀ṣọ́, 1932-2012), ìjálá. The most documented ìjálá artist of the recording era. Around twenty albums, a pioneer of the digital documentation of ìjálá performance, and known above all for bringing contemporary social and political material into the chant, his ìjálá on the Nigerian tax war of 1969 being the standard example . There is a scholarly literature on his work, including ecocritical and socio-religious-historical readings .
Àlàbí Ògúndépọ̀, ìjálá, studied alongside the Ifá chanter Yẹmí Ẹlẹ́buìbọn for performative agency in transitional settings . Ẹlẹ́buìbọn is a named Ifá priest whose chanting has been separately published.
Lámídì Abonikaba, ìrèmọ̀jé. Chanted the dirge for the deceased hunter Ògúnjìnmí at Ọ̀yọ́ in 1975, recorded by Bade Ajuwon . A Lámídì also chanted at Akeetan, Ọ̀yọ́ in 1976 for the deceased hunter Ògúndélé; whether this is the same performer is not stated in the accessible sources and is not assumed here.
Láńrewájú Adépọ̀jù (c. 1940-December 2023), ewì. The central figure in modern Yoruba poetry performance, whose own summary of his contribution is that he modernised and professionalised ewì . He pioneered ewì on disc and later cassette, using recording technology to produce extended poems, and his Ewi Hit Hot series circulated widely through the Yoruba-speaking area . Broadcasting gave him his platform. Okunoye's study in Africa presents him as a local intellectual whose work and ideas shaped contemporary Yoruba poetry, drawing on biography, an extensive personal interview and textual illustration, and treats ewì as an open form inhabiting the interface between the oral and the written . Ọlátúbọ̀sún Ọládàpọ̀ is the other major ewì figure, and their collections in the early 1970s marked the genre's new awakening .
Musicians using oral genres in commercial recording, documented by Orimoogunje: Àyìnlá Ọmọwúrà, who uses ọfọ̀ in his records, and Fatai Olowonyo, Sikiru Ayinde, Haruna Isola, Yusuf Olatunji (Baba L'Ẹgbaa), Dauda Epo Akara, Adedara Arounralojaoba, Odolaye Aremu and Kasumu Adio, who use ìbà, ìwúre, epè and oríkì in performance . File 14 treats this line.
Collectors and transcribers who should be named because their fieldwork is what preserved the texts: Adeboye Babalola for ìjálá, Bade Ajuwon for ìrèmọ̀jé, Oludare Olajubu for ẹ̀sà, Karin Barber for the Òkukù oríkì, Val Ọlayẹmi for the ìbejì songs, Babatunde Lawal and the Drewals for Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́, Ladele and Faniyi for ẹkún ìyàwó, and Wande Abimbola for Ifá.
What is not known
Three honest gaps, which is why this file is marked confidence: intermediate.
Training is undocumented by design. The apprenticeship system is informal, unstructured and undocumented , so statements about how long training takes, what it costs and what the curriculum contains are not reliably available, and none are made here.
Most performers are anonymous in the record. For the great majority of published Yoruba oral texts, including many in this section, we know the collector and not the chanter. Where a name, place and date exist, this corpus reports them, and the frequency with which it cannot is itself a finding about how the material was collected.
The current generation is thinly documented. Living ìjálá, rárà and ẹkún ìyàwó performers working in Nigeria today are largely absent from the accessible scholarship, appearing mainly in journalism and on social media. Ìjálá chanters have publicly complained of neglect . Whoever is doing this work now is not being written about at the level Fóyánmu was.