Tuelo: An unexpected career in music

Before forming Tuelo and Her Cousins, the band she started in in 2013, she did backup work with the late Hugh Masekela in 2008 and Angelique Kidjo from 2010 to 2012. The petite South African singer has also worked with Paul Simon and Lebo M.

Tuelo has a humble but boisterous demeanour. She speaks with a powerful voice that fills the room and her British accent could fool one that she's spent a considerable amount of time in the UK although she's never lived there. Her assertive personality is quite removed from the shy and reserved child she says she was when living on a farm in the northern South African city of Mahikeng.

“I was always very quiet. I’m sure there are people who don’t remember that I lived there. That’s how much of a nobody I was,” Tuelo says.

As a child Tuelo was a bookworm who loved science fiction and hated school. Her intelligence didn’t reflect in her grades until her parents decided to take the classroom home. After that she began to surprise her tutors and graduated from high school before her peers.

“I did some home-schooling. It’s the one thing that changed my thinking of the whole world. I knew that I didn’t function well in school. My parents gave me everything that made me excel."

Tuelo had never thought about pursuing music as a career. As a child she tried playing the trumpet but gave up. She didn’t think she had much of a talent for anything.

“I played everything and nothing worked out. I didn’t think I was particularly creative but I always wrote a journal since I was about 8. Every day I would write an entry. I should be better by now but I need to try harder to write more. I'd fill up my diary. That was all I thought I had to me.”

Her diary entries eventually became songs. But she only wrote her first composition after moving to the US. She recalls with excitement the day she wrote it.

“One day I was watching a documentary about this new thing in the US where all unlawfully imprisoned people were being released. The first guy was released and I wrote a song in about 10 minutes. I know now that it takes a lot of inspiration to write but that day it was screaming at me. It was like song and melody and words and everything wrapped in one.”

At first Tuelo sang in karaoke bars with her friends. She then met a friend from South Africa who was in New York to record a song with Hugh Masekela. She was invited to the studio to wait for her friend. What happened next is almost like fiction. One of the producers in the room asked Tuelo if she could sing and she said, “Of course I can sing, I’m South African. Everyone in South Africa can sing.” The producer asked her to sing a song that could give him an idea of her range. She sang ‘Greatest Love of All’ by Whitney Houston. "It was the only song I could think of,” she says.

When she got home the phone rang and she was told that she got the job: a backup singer for Bra Hugh. The recording session then became a tour where Tuelo would get to sing for a paying audience.

“I was going to my first rehearsal and I remember being called by the guy who auditioned me and he said, 'Young girl, you do not walk in there looking like you don’t know what you’re doing, 'cause we know that you don’t know what you’re doing. You have a special voice and it needs to be heard. You have to walk in there and hold your own'.”

After the Hugh Masekela godsend, Tuelo began getting booked for a bunch of gigs where she met the members of what would become Tuelo and Her Cousins. Since the band's formation in 2013, Tuelo has release a self-titled album and a five-track EP titled Saint Margaret.

“I didn’t want to sing. I wanted a simple life. I just met these people and they were like, 'You should get it together and do something about it'," Tuelo says.

Listen to the Saint Margaret EP on SoundCloud.