I.K. Dairo

Considered by many the "father of juju" on account of his numerous innovations, Isaiah Kehinde Dairo entered the world in Nigeria’s Kwara State in 1931. One account traces his enduring passion for music to a drum fashioned for him during childhood by his father, a carpenter, an instrument that traveled with him at every turn. As a young man he pursued a variety of livelihoods, working as a barber, a construction laborer, and a cloth trader before other occupations. At night he joined early juju ensembles directed by the pioneering musicians Ojoge Daniel and Oladele Oro. During the mid-1950s he assembled his own ten-piece outfit, the Morning Star Orchestra, which later achieved recognition under the name Blue Spots.

Although highlife dominated West African band music throughout that era, Dairo and his musicians issued a steady stream of influential singles that, once the Nigerian Civil War concluded in 1970, had helped elevate juju to the nation’s leading popular style. He altered the character of juju by adding the accordion and talking drums to the ensemble while performing in multiple regional dialects, thereby extending the music’s reach into rural communities. When his popularity diminished toward the close of the 1970s, he retired from the stage and first managed clubs and a hotel in Lagos before entering the ministry of the Cherubim and Seraphim church movement. In 1990 he cut his first album in fifteen years with a reconstituted Blue Spots lineup.