Ai Du

Ai Du is the ninth of ten tracks on Talking Timbuktu and runs 7:09. It is sung in Songhai, the language of Ali Farka Toure's own people, and belongs to his Malian material rather than to Cooder's catalogue. Cooder produced the album and played electric slide guitar and mandolin on this track.

Toure sings and plays acoustic guitar. Gatemouth Brown plays viola, Jim Keltner drums and John Patitucci bass guitar, with Oumar Toure on bongos and chorus and Hamma Sankare on calabash. The album as a whole came together quickly in Hollywood. Toure rejected the idea that his music was the blues, saying that blues is only a color. Ai Du sits late in the running order, just before the closing Diaraby.

The song gave its name to a 1994 promotional CD single from World Circuit and Hannibal, Ai Du + 2. The single added live versions of Diaraby and Keito that had not been released before, recorded for Chris Douridas's Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW-FM.