About

The Songarkive is a non-profit, open archive of traditional and grassroots Nigerian music: church choruses, folk songs, work songs, highlife, ceremonial chants and lullabies. It exists to record who made these songs and the evidence for it.

The problem

Most of this music spread by voice rather than by paper. It was rarely written into sheet music and almost never registered with a copyright board, so the industry that later sold it filed it under “Traditional” or “Public Domain”. Those two words are a filing decision, not a finding of fact, and they erase the composers, congregations, villages and revivals the songs actually came from.

The gap is a metadata gap, so the repair is a metadata repair: a public, citable record of origin, with the evidence attached and the disputes visible.

What the badges mean

• Verified origin

  A moderator has accepted evidence for an attribution on this song.

• Under review

  Someone has claimed an origin and it is being assessed.

• Disputed

  A dispute is open on this song or on one of its claims.

• Traditional / Public

  Claims have been made but none has survived assessment. The song is treated as traditional for now, which is a description of the state of the evidence rather than a verdict on the song.

• Unattributed

  No origin has been claimed yet. Most of the archive starts here.

Badges are derived from the claims and disputes on a record. Nobody sets one by hand.

How a claim is settled

Anyone signed in may open a dispute or file evidence. Evidence is locked at submission and a hash of it is recorded, so nobody, including us, can quietly rewrite it afterwards. A correction is made by filing new evidence that supersedes the old, never by editing the record of what was originally said.

Evidence that argues against a claim is stored as carefully as evidence for it. A moderator judges two things separately: whether a source is authentic, and how much weight it carries. A nephew’s recollection can be entirely genuine and still be anecdotal, and the archive says so rather than treating it like a dated hymnal.

Every accepted change is written to a public history, reachable from the foot of each song page.

Searching

Indigenous spellings vary, so search is fuzzy by design: case, punctuation and diacritics are folded, and Yoruba tone marks and dot-below characters resolve to their plain letters. You can search by the first line you remember rather than the title, which is usually how people actually look for a chorus. Try it.

What this is not

An attribution here is a historical and cultural record. It is not a determination of copyright ownership, and it is not legal advice. Where a song is contested we show the dispute rather than resolving it for you.

Licensing

Text and metadata are available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Evidence files carry their own rights notes and are not covered by that licence; many are held by families, churches and archives who allowed their use here and nowhere else.

Corrections

If a page is wrong, say so on the page itself. That is what the contest link at the foot of every song is for, and a correction with a source attached is worth more to the archive than a perfect record with none.