A Life in Music

Ìtàn · The Story

From a demo tape in Epe to the crown of a genre

She began singing at thirteen. At fifteen she released a debut album that became the first record by a female Yoruba artist to sell over a million copies in Nigeria. In the fifty years since, she has turned waka, a community women's form, into national canon, and carried it onto stages her generation was told were not theirs.