Ali Farka Touré

Niafunké

Ali Ibrahim Touré was born in 1939 in Kanau, a village on the Niger in north-west Mali, then French Sudan. He was his mother's tenth son and the first to survive infancy. His father died serving in the French army when Ali was a baby, and the family moved down the river to Niafunké, which he called home for the rest of his life. His nickname, Farka, means donkey, an animal he admired for its strength and tenacity. His family were noble Arma, descended from the Songhai, and they disapproved of music, the work of hereditary musician families. He never went to school.

As a boy he was drawn to the ghimbala ceremonies for the river spirits, though his Islamic faith kept him from taking a serious part, and at twelve he made his own single-string instrument. Seeing Fodéba Keïta with the National Ballet of Guinea in 1956 settled his course: he said that was when he swore to become a guitarist. He founded La Troupe 117 in 1960 and joined the Niafunké district cultural troupe in 1962.

Radio Mali

In 1968 he represented Mali at a festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, and bought his first guitar there. The same year he first heard John Lee Hooker and felt that this music had been taken from his own part of the world. In the 1970s he was a sound engineer at Radio Mali in Bamako, which had the only recording studio in the country. He sent recordings to Son Afric in Paris, which released seven LPs, the first in 1976. He sang mainly in Songhay, Fulfulde, Tamasheq and Bambara.

World Circuit

In 1986 Andy Kershaw played his red Sonodisc album on BBC Radio 1, and Charlie Gillett took an interest. In 1987 World Circuit brought him to Britain to record Ali Farka Touré, his first album made outside Africa. The River and The Source followed. In 1992 he met Ry Cooder in London at the home of World Circuit's Nick Gold. With one guitar between them, they took turns playing it and agreed to make something together one day. Touré gave Cooder the one-string lute he had played as a child.

Talking Timbuktu was recorded in Los Angeles in September 1993, fitted into an American tour, and released in March 1994. It ends with Ai Du and Diaraby. It held the top of Billboard's World Music chart for a record 32 weeks and won a Grammy, and in May 1994 he played Later... with Jools Holland on BBC Two. Touré himself was cool about it. In 2001 he told Hot Press that Cooder had not changed how he made the record, and that he preferred the albums he made without him.

Farmer and mayor

In 1997 he announced he would concentrate on farming at Niafunké, installing irrigation pumps. By 2003 he had 40 hectares of paddy fields and about 2,800 fruit trees. So the music came to him: Nick Gold brought a studio to an abandoned agricultural school in the town for Niafunké (1999). Mississippi to Mali, with Corey Harris, followed in 2002. In 2003 he appeared in Martin Scorsese's Feel Like Going Home and said he would stop touring outside Mali, and from that year until 2006 he played the closing concert of the Festival au Désert.

Elected mayor of Niafunké in 2004, he refused a salary and paid for a power plant for the town himself, according to the Dakar daily Le Soleil. In the Heart of the Moon, made with Toumani Diabaté without rehearsal in a room on the roof of the Hôtel Mandé in Bamako, came out in 2005 and won a Grammy the following February.

You'll find the true lineage of the blues in Africa.

Ali Farka Touré, Hot Press, 2001

Death and legacy

He died of bone cancer in March 2006. Mali's state radio suspended its programming to play his music, he was given a state funeral and made a Commandeur de l'Ordre National du Mali, and he was buried in Niafunké. Savane, recorded at the Hôtel Mandé in 2004, came out that July. Ali and Toumani (2010) won a third Grammy, and Voyageur (2023) gathered unreleased recordings, including duets with Oumou Sangaré.

He rejected the label of an African John Lee Hooker and held that American blues grew from West African music, not the other way round. Spin ranked him 37th among the greatest guitarists. Nick Gold has said that Safari, from the red album, reportedly influenced Tuareg bands including Tinariwen. His son Vieux Farka Touré carries on the music, and in 2022 made the tribute album Ali with Khruangbin.