The Voices of Birds
An aetiological tale in which a jealous magician talks a grove of plain brown songbirds into trading their voices for bright feathers, explaining why the most beautiful birds cannot sing.
Collector
No collector is named in the source consulted.
How it was performed
Evening telling, treated in `yoruba-alo`. No song is recorded, though a tale about birds losing their voices would be an odd one to sing, and the corpus notes without asserting that its subject may be the reason. Given Ogumefu's stated omission of songs (`alo-ogumefu-1929-as-a-source`), the absence is not evidence either way. The tale's shape in performance is a single speech with three moves, which makes it a teller's piece rather than an audience's: the magician's persuasion is the whole event, and it is delivered to a grove of birds who function as the room.
The tale in brief
This is an aetiological tale explaining why the most beautiful birds cannot sing. A magician, jealous because he has no singing voice of his own, persuades a grove of plain brown songbirds that their feathers are ugly, and offers to make them brilliantly coloured in exchange for their voices. They agree. He collects the voices in a calabash, swallows them, and becomes famous for his singing. Recorded in English by M. I. Ogumefu in 1929. It is the nearest thing in this section to the wise-and-foolish moral comedy that Yorùbá tradition treats at length in proverb form, and the tale's persuasion speech is its whole substance.
The tale
A magician once passed through a grove in the forest where a great many brown birds fluttered from tree to tree and filled the air with songs. For a long time he sat and listened, enraptured by their beautiful melodies, but in the end he became very jealous, for he himself could not sing. At last he felt that he must by some means possess the voices of these singing birds, so he called them all together and said: > It grieves me that the gods have given you all such poor, ugly brown feathers. How happy you would be if you were brilliantly coloured with red, blue, orange, and green! And the birds agreed that it was a great pity to be so ugly. The magician then suggested that by means of his charms he could give them all beautiful feathers in exchange for their voices, which were, after all, of very little use to them, since nobody came into the grove to hear them. The birds thought over his words, and desired very much the beauty he promised them. So they foolishly agreed to give him their voices, which the magician placed all together in a large calabash. He then used his charms to turn the dull brown feathers into orange and green and red, and they were very pleased. The magician hurried away, and as soon as he came to a deserted place he opened the calabash and swallowed its contents. From that day he had an exceedingly sweet voice, and people came from far and near to listen to his songs. But the birds were satisfied with their bright feathers. And this is why the most beautiful birds are quite unable to sing.
Variants
No Yorùbá-language version and no second collection of this tale were located by this compiler. The record consulted is silent on variation and on any song.