Keep Our Folk Songs Alive (Don't break the chain)

In every society around the globe, among every ethnic group, every community, every clan, people create songs they sing during various occasion. Songs that they identify with, songs that when they sing, or hear someone sing, will often whip up emotions, nostalgic memories, and so on. These songs are sometimes tagged folk songs, they often become an integer of who we are. In all traditional societies, these songs are often handed down from one generation to another. Among the Igbo people of Nigeria, such songs were in the old times learnt informally through parents, and other members of the family. As formal education became the norms, they became taught in the schools. This was also the trend in most of Nigeria, and other African ethnic societies.

While growing up, I learnt to sing many of the Igbo folk songs from my primary school, and also from my mother, and other family members. Most songs are part of the Igbo folk-tales which are often accompanied by songs. The art of telling folk stories among the Igbo people is often theatrical,  in the sense that it has got all the elements of theatre, with music, and drama components.

Some years ago, I visited a primary school in Awka town, the capital of Anambra State of Nigeria. On entering one of the classrooms, I quickly found my childhood again, and started one of the common folk songs we sang in those days. The children happily joined me, and we sang with our hearts. After the first song, I was so excited and I introduced another common folk song, but did not get any response from the kids. Looking into their big brown eyes, I realized the song did not get any recognition. I switched, to another, still no reaction, then another, and the same result. On my the fourth attempt, I got a few voices that went the first line with me, and yet fewer to the second line. By the third line, I was on my own. That was when I gave up.

This experience got me worried. I could feel a break in a tradition that has been there from the beginning of time. I imagined that this could be the situation in every primary school in Igboland, if not the entire nation. I also realised that this is another case of negligence which has become the hallmark of present day Nigeria in almost every sector.
There are no more dedicated individuals and governments that investigate issues like these through research to find new ways of impacting folk ways unto the children. The old traditional ways have been eroded by many factors, chief of which being the change in lifestyle, and the constant surge to the cities, and the stress of making a living.

It dawned on me that nobody considered finding new ways of making these important aspect of our culture available to the young ones. It was all these worries that made me to start documenting Igbo folk songs and recording them, a process that has been on going for some years now.

Here is a sample, a song titled 'Onoli-Noli' accompanied with 'Ubo'