Awon Festival Songs as Folk Beatitudes

Abstract

Traditional festivals are often laced with folklore and folksongs with which custodians celebrate and savour the aroma of their cultural heritage. As a form of orality or performative art, festivals are imbued with aesthetic templates that encompass moral lessons as well as performance modes that guide and delight the community in its daily life. Awon festival is a good example of a folk celebration that is rich in songs and other performance modes. In providing answers to the question on the significance of the songs, the paper explores the entertaining as well as the didactic tunes of the selected songs which usually accompany dance performance as an integral feature of the annual traditional Awon mass wedding events. It x-rays the typology of the songs and the contextual reference from the point of view of content and form. These songs are collected through recordings of the folk performers during the 2019 edition of the annual festival. The translation of the songs was largely done by the researcher and with reference to a publication by Wole Oke entitled: My People, their Tradition; Custom and Culture (1996). The finding of the paper is that festival songs in Awon festival take the form of ballad, which is a communicative genre in the community and for the audience at large. The study provides a rich exploration of the aesthetics of Awon festival dance to compensate for the little scholastic attention given to this integral component of the festival. The rendition during celebration serves the purpose of instruction, renewal and comic relief. It is recommended that the festival songs be explored as mythic and spiritual fountains that invigorate the beliefand confidence of the custodians. Keywords:Awon, Festival, Songs, Ballad, Folks