Ali Farka Touré

Ali Ibrahim Touré was born on the thirty-first of October 1939 at the village of Kanau on the Niger River in the Tombouctou Region of French Soudan, the tenth child of his father Naoba Touré — a Songhai noble household of subsistence agriculturalists — and his mother Kounandi Samba Diawara of Sonrai descent. The first nine children of the family had died in infancy or early childhood; Ali was given the household nickname Farka — Songhai for donkey — at his birth as a propitiation against the spirits believed responsible for the family's losses.

He was raised at Niafunké on the upper Niger and attended the village Quranic school through his tenth year. He left to work as a fisherman and a herder. He took up the gurkel — the single-stringed traditional Songhai monochord — at twelve and the guitar at seventeen. He worked through his twenties as a colonial agricultural cooperative officer for the Office du Niger at Niafunké and from 1968 as a sound engineer at the new Radio Mali broadcasting service.

He recorded his first commercial sides for the Radio Mali label across the 1970s. His decisive international break came in 1988 with the release of the album Ali Farka Touré on the World Circuit label of the British producer Nick Gold. The album — recorded at the Hotel Mandé in Bamako in 1987 — established him at forty-nine to the international audience as the foremost African-blues guitarist of his generation.

The 1994 collaboration with the American slide-guitarist Ry Cooder — the album Talking Timbuktu — won the 1995 Grammy Award for Best World Music Album. The 2005 collaboration with the kora player Toumani Diabaté — the album In the Heart of the Moon — won the same Grammy in 2006.

He served from 2004 as mayor of Niafunké and invested across his last decade the substantial portion of his recording income in agricultural-development projects on the upper Niger flood plain.

He died of bone cancer at Bamako on the seventh of March 2006, at sixty-six.

He is honored here as the master of the desert blues.