Diaraby

Ali Farka Touré was born in 1939 on the banks of the Niger and grew up in Niafunké. His family were of the noble caste, and in Malian society music was the duty of the griots, so he was forbidden to play. He secretly built a one-stringed instrument from a tin can anyway. A 1956 performance by Guinea's national ballet made him determined to learn guitar, and on a trip to represent Mali in Bulgaria he bought his first one and heard African-American music for the first time. John Lee Hooker struck him as something that belonged to his own culture, though he always insisted his music was older than the blues. Through the 1970s he worked as a sound engineer at Radio Mali, using the only recording studio in the country. In 1994 he made Talking Timbuktu with the American guitarist Ry Cooder in a Hollywood studio. By Cooder's account, Touré disliked the place and called it a source of bad energy. Its ten songs move between Peul, Bambara, Songhai and Tamasheq, and the last of them is "Diaraby", sung in Bambara. Talking Timbuktu won the Grammy for Best World Music Album and later went gold across Europe. The riff from "Diaraby" had an unusual afterlife too: it was chosen as the theme for the Geo-quiz on the radio programme The World, and when the producers put it to a vote, listeners insisted it stay. Touré died in 2006. A riff he recorded in a studio he disliked became the piece of his music that listeners voted to keep.