Musical Varieties in Yorùbá Oral Poetry: A Synopsis of Selected Genres

Abstract

Languages, literature, poetry, are strong universal means of communicating the emotional, spiritual, educative, and intellectual concerns of mankind. The Yorùbá like every other people of the world, have their own language, dialects, literature and poetry. Several attempts have therefore, been made by several scholars to classify Yorùbá oral poetry into varieties. Some of this poetry are sung, chanted, or rendered in a speech-recitation mode. It is not less than a truism that the qualities of a piece of oral poetry can be best x-rayed in performance. This paper therefore, attempts to look at some of the poetries that are musically performed as stage presentation with references to four examples.