Samuel, who proudly says he’s half-Indian, grew up in a household where Hindi movies were watched religiously.
For Nigerian singer Samuel Adepoju, his go-to expression for anything untoward is “Arrey bhagwan!”. That’s not all the Hindi he knows. He can sing the latest Bollywood number at the drop of a hat. But what sets him apart are his soulful covers of Indian regional songs, infused with techno beats, and sung in a earthy African accent.
His latest release, a cover of Odia song Maya re baya, has been welcomed in the country with arms wide open. It’s just over a week since the catchy cover was released, and it has already garnered more than 179k views on YouTube.The comments section of the song is overflowing with admiration for Adepoju, also known as Samuel Singh.
Samuel, who proudly says he’s half-Indian, grew up in a household where Hindi movies were watched religiously. His parents are Bollywood fans and in Lagos, a lot people keenly watch Hindi movies. He even had an Indian girl friend.
But Samuel didn’t develop any special liking for the movies or the songs, until he visited India in 2010. He had arrived to get treated for cancer on his wrist. Although he lost a part of his left arm to the surgery, he left the country with no bitter feelings. “It was a tough time and that is when I got reconnected to Bollywood,” he says. He had no idea that he would return to India two years later, this time to Jaipur, as an engineering student. His friends at college ensured he listened to more than just Bollywood. A song that caught his attention was Pawan Singh’s Bhojpuri hit Lollipop lagelu and he decided to perform it at a college fest. The adulation he received was beyond his imagination.
But it was only in 2017 that he decided to record Lollipop and release it on YouTube. The video, which has been pulled off due to copyright complications, launched him into internet stardom. Samuel also realised that he had cracked the code. So covers of other hit songs such as Rangabati (an Odia classic) and Teri aakhya ka yo kajal (Sapna Choudhary’s Haryanvi hit) followed.
“A lot of people asked me if I could do Rangabati. I went on YouTube and the first video that popped up was Sona Mohapatra’s Coke Studio version. I was taken aback and I had never heard anything like that,” he says. His version of Rangabati has over 1.2 million views on YouTube and counting, and his latest offering Maya re baya was a way of thanking his zealous Odia supporters. Samuel records his songs in his home studio with a single-mic setup. The 27-year-old, who runs a small transport business back home, says he doesn’t understand most part of the lyrics of songs he does, but that hardly stops him from enjoying it. “I write down the lyrics on a paper in English and use them while recording. By the time the audio is done, I get comfortable with it,” he says.
His music has drawn interest among people back in Lagos too. Even the Nigerian press has noticed his popularity. The Nigerian Watch newspaper ran a story with a headline: “Nigerian Samuel Adepoju enters fame status in India after singing a Hindi song”.
He now plans to do more regional covers and also do African numbers. A Punjabi and Tamil cover is in the pipeline. “I can probably tell you what I am going to work on next week. Aage ka kisko pata hai,” he says.