Gospel singer Tope Alabi, has shared details of her growing up years in a new interview with Sunday Scoop.
According to the singer, her mum, who amongst all of her family members, was the only one who supported her music career choice, checked if she was still a virgin every three months until she got married.
Yes, she did because she was also a singer. She always sang around the house. She believed that one didn’t have to be immoral simply because she is a singer. Every other member of my family was not pleased with my music career but my mother never took offence. She taught me that a female shouldn’t be too close to men.
For example, I was never bathed at the same time with my male siblings. My mother used to check if my virginity was intact every three months interval before I got married; especially whenever I returned from movie locations.
When I newly got married to my husband, we went to the National Theatre in Lagos to watch a movie and actors like Yinka Quadri, Ebun Oloyede, among others were there. When they saw my husband, they congratulated him and told him that he had chosen a good and exemplary wife. That made my husband quite happy. My mum was very strict and she never spared the rod. She also showed me a lot of motherly love.
On how she started her entertainment career;
I started my entertainment career as an actress and back then, they didn’t do personalised soundtracks for movies. One day, one of my colleagues, Adio Majesta, said I should be able to compose songs for movies. He told me the title of the movie and that was how I started making soundtracks for movies. He believed I could do it because I always sang whenever we were on location and sometimes, I used the incident happening at that particular time to compose songs.
