page_title: Ayọ
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Ayọ / Biography / Early years
caption_attribution_description: Ayo en Concert au Sporting Monte Carlo - Monaco le 30 Aout 2007 (cropped version)
context_page_description: Ayọ is a Nigerian-German singer-songwriter and actress. She uses the Yoruba translation Ayọ or Ayo. of her first name Joy.
  Her debut album Joyful, which was first released in 2006, reached Double-Platinum status in France, Platinum in Germany and Poland, Gold status in Switzerland and Italy and Greece. The album was released in the United States on 20 November 2007 by Interscope Records.
  Ayọ was born in Frechen near Cologne, Germany. She has a son, Nile, who was born in late 2005 and a daughter, Billie-Eve, born July 2010, with the Sierra Leonian-German reggae singer Patrice, from whom she is now separated. In March 2017 her third child, Jimi-Julius, was born. At the end of 2007, she moved with her family to the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan in New York City. At present she lives in Brooklyn, New York with her children.
  Then-president of UNICEF France, Jacques Hintzy, announced on 4 February 2009 that the singer was named patron of UNICEF to promote the right to education for all children in the world.
  The French production company MK2 produced the film Ayo Joy, a 90-minute documentary about the singer and her life, in 2009. The film was directed by Raphaël Duroy.
context_section_description: Ayọ was born near Cologne, Germany as the fourth child of a Nigerian father and a German-Sinti mother. She lived for a short time in Nigeria as a baby. She has one sister and two brothers. When she was about six years old her mother became addicted to heroin and spent some time in jail. After her parents divorced, she and two of her siblings spent periods of time in care and with foster families. She spent four years in a children's home in Schwalmtal-Waldniel where she learned to play violin and piano and became in 1992 a member of its music band "La Taste". When she was fourteen she was considered old enough by the authorities to live again with her father.
caption: Monaco, 30 August 2007 (photo by Lionel Urman)
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