7 King Sunny Ade 7

King Sunny Ade

(b. Sept. 1, 1946, Oshogbo, Nigeria)

N

igerian popular musician Sunday Adeniyi, popularly
known as King Sunny Ade, was in the vanguard of
the development and international popularization of juju
music—a fusion of traditional Yoruba vocal forms and
percussion with Western rock and roll.
“King” Sunny Ade enjoyed noble status not only
through birth into the Yoruba royalty of southwestern
Nigeria but also through popular acclaim as the “King of
Juju” since the late 1970s. In his youth Ade played highlife,
a type of urban dance music that emerged in Ghana in the
late 19th century and blended elements of church music,
military brass-band music, sea shanties, and various local
African traditions. In the mid-1960s Ade abandoned
highlife for juju, a related musical genre that arose in
Nigeria in the 1920s as an expression of the urban Yoruba
working class. He assembled his own juju band, the Green
Spots, which he later renamed the African Beats, reflect-
ing the re-Africanization of the genre that had been
occurring since the early 1950s in conjunction with a
growing sense of nationalism.
Prior to Ade’s formation of the African Beats, one of
his most notable predecessors, I.K. Dairo, had already
modified juju through incorporation of Yoruba “talking”
drums—which replicate the tones of Yoruba language—
and through extensive use of the call-and-response vocal
structure that is typical of the traditional music of many
sub-Saharan African peoples, including the Yoruba. Upon
this musical foundation, Ade laid a tapestry of guitar voices
infused with the rhythmic and melodic colours of rock
and roll. Ade’s early albums with the African Beats, most
notably Sound Vibration (1977) and The Royal Sound (1979),
were tremendously successful, and, when the press