Tunde King

Lore & Background

Abdulrafiu Babatunde King was born in the Saro-dominated Olowogbowo area of Lagos Island on 24 August 1910. He was the son of Ibrahim Sanni King, a member of the minority Muslim Saro community. His father was a chief Native Court clerk at Ilaro and had lived for some time in Fourah Bay, Sierra Leone. Tunde King attended a local Methodist primary school and Eko Boys High School. A schoolmate taught him to play guitar, and he became a leading member of a local group of 'area boys' who hung out at a mechanic's shop on West Balogun Street. The group talked, drank beer and sang, accompanied by improvised instruments. By 1929, King had a clerical job and worked part-time as a singer and guitarist with a trio including guitar, samba and maracas, later changing to tambourine, guitar-banjo, and sekere. By the mid-1930s, he enjoyed considerable success, with several recordings and radio broadcasts, but still relied on live performances to earn a living, often at private functions. For example, King played at the wake of the prominent doctor Oguntola Sapara in June 1935. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Tunde King joined the Merchant Marines. He returned to Lagos in 1941, then disappeared for the next eleven years. He was rediscovered playing in Francophone ports such as Conakry and Dakar, and returned to Lagos in 1954. He died in the 1980s.

Reader's Guide

Tunde King is significant as the founder of Jùjú music, a genre that emerged from the Palm Wine music of Lagos in the 1920s. His trio, later a quartet, created a guitar-centered sound blending Yoruba talking drum with Western and Afro-Cuban influences. The name 'Jùjú' originated when King bought a tambourine from a Salvation Army store; his drummer developed a flamboyant style of throwing and catching it, which the audience called 'Jù-jú,' duplicating the Yoruba word for 'throw.' King's recordings for Parlophone, starting in 1936, including 'Oba Oyinbo' and 'Eko Akete,' established his reputation, though he earned little from them. His songs expressed widespread feelings under British colonial rule, with ironic lyrics in 'Oba Oyinbo' and more explicit resentment in unrecorded songs like 'Soja Idunmota' and 'Eti Joluwe.' His legacy influenced contemporaries and later players such as Akanbi Ege, Ayinde Bakare, Tunde Nightingale, King Sunny Adé, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, General Prince Adekunle, Sir Shina Peters, and Segun Adewale, spanning from the 1940s into the 1980s.

Did You Know?

• The name 'Jùjú' came from a tambourine King bought at a Salvation Army store; his drummer threw it in the air, and the audience called it 'Jù-jú,' the Yoruba word for 'throw.'
• King's first mass recordings were made by Parlophone of the EMI group starting in 1936, released on 78 rpm shellac discs.
• He joined the Merchant Marines in 1939 and was rediscovered playing in Francophone ports such as Conakry and Dakar after disappearing for eleven years.

Pioneering a Sound in the 1920s

Tunde King, born Abdulrafiu Babatunde King, is widely recognized as the figure who first began shaping what would become jùjú music in Lagos during the 1920s. In those early days, the ensembles were small and intimate, typically organized as trios: a bandleader who simultaneously sang and strummed a banjo, a dedicated tambourine player, and a sèkèrè (gourd rattle) player, with an occasional fourth member joining as a supporting vocalist. The sonic palette was deliberately modest—acoustic guitar or banjo, hand drums, the gourd rattle, the tambourine, and the human voice—yet within that compact framework, King cultivated a rich interplay of call-and-response singing, layered harmonies, repetitive refrains, and polyrhythmic percussion. Improvisation and expressive vocal delivery were central to his approach. The social soil in which this music grew was the Saro, or Olowogbowo, quarter of Lagos, where groups of young men known as area boys gathered to drink, socialize, and make music. King's work in these informal settings laid the groundwork for a genre that would not crystallize into a recognizable form until the mid-1930s.

A Confluence of Local and Foreign Sounds

King's musical vocabulary drew from a remarkable convergence of local traditions and imported influences. The Christian community in Olowogbowo provided a crucial structural foundation; the free, unstructured singing at wake-keeping ceremonies—distinct from rigid four-part church services—gave the area boys access to hymn-tune melodies in Yoruba, diatonic scale progressions, and parallel thirds at cadence points. King's composition Yisa Imouru is often cited as a direct embodiment of these church-derived elements. Equally important was asiko dance drumming, a tradition tied to Yoruba Christian communities that was at its peak during King's youth in the 1920s. Beyond these local roots, three foreign threads wove into the fabric of his music. The Salvation Army introduced the tambourine to Lagos around 1920, an instrument locals called eight corners and associated with elevated spiritual awareness. Brazilian samba rhythms, carried back by Yoruba ex-slaves who had purchased their freedom, contributed a steady two-beat pulse that became jùjú's duple rhythmic backbone. Finally, Kru sailors from Liberia, who entertained in the Olowogbowo area, shared their call-and-response folk songs and a two-finger guitar technique known as krusbass, which King adopted and evolved into a standard tuning progression he called Johnny Walker is a Mighty Man.

Performance as Social Ritual

Jùjú was never merely a concert format; it was a living social practice. Performances routinely stretched across hours with no scheduled breaks, and bands relied on a repertoire they could reproduce entirely from memory rather than from written scores. The bandleader held a crucial role: reading the mood of the crowd at a social gathering and adjusting the set in real time to match the audience's energy and preferences. Lyrically, the music served as a vehicle for praise, storytelling, and pointed social commentary, touching on identity, community bonds, spiritual belief, and the rhythms of everyday life in Yoruba. King himself performed regularly at informal gatherings held at Till Nelson's motor-mechanic workshop, where he would improvise on esa texts associated with asiko dance music or on simple folksongs like Orin Kurumo, weaving his social observations into the Yoruba language. The area boys in Olowogbowo clearly preferred the spontaneous, expressive atmosphere of wake-keeping ceremonies over the formality of regular church services, and that preference for unstructured musical freedom became a defining aesthetic of the genre King was helping to create.

From Trio to Genre: Legacy and Expansion

Although King's experiments in the 1920s were the seed, jùjú did not emerge as a clearly identifiable genre until 1932, when it crystallized in Lagos under the influence of palm wine guitar music and the broader asiko tradition. By the end of World War II, the typical ensemble had expanded from the early trio to a quartet, and the postwar era brought a wave of competing bands that pushed instrumentation far beyond its acoustic roots. Electric guitars, synthesizers, pedal steel guitar, saxophones, talking drums (introduced to the genre in 1948), thumb pianos, conga-type drums, and Hawaiian guitar all found their way into jùjú arrangements. The adoption of electric amplification made it possible to sustain much larger ensembles, transforming what had been an intimate neighborhood sound into a full-scale popular music movement. The very name jùjú carried the weight of a colonial-era label for African spiritual practices, a term that stuck because of the tambourine's mystical associations in the local imagination. King's foundational work in those early Saro-quarter gatherings thus became the bedrock upon which an entire tradition of Yoruba popular music was built, evolving continuously while retaining the call-and-response spirit, the duple pulse, and the improvisatory freedom he first championed.