By the time he was 60 years old, Ali Farka Touré had become Mali's most famous guitarist, but he much preferred to spend his days tending his rice and fruit farm in the town of Niafunké along the dry northern reaches of the Niger River. The world's appetite for his warm, spiritual picking and singing was touching to him, but rarely enough to coax him onto the road, or even into a recording studio.  When he died in Mali in 2006, he hadn’t toured in the US for nearly eight years, just the way he liked it.  A certain ambivalence about the life of a musician was there from the start, for Touré was born a noble, a person musicians were supposed to sing for, not the reverse.  Just the same, he was a musicians’ musician, and deep down, he knew that all along.

Touré's admirers in the West tended to see him as an African bluesman, a spiritual cousin of John Lee Hooker. But for Touré, American blues was merely a New World reflection of Malian sounds he had known all his life. Touré championed the beautiful, old cultures of the northern region of Mali, around Timbuktu. He said, "The Tamasheck, Peul, Dogon, Songhai, Bambara, Bozo and Maure--seven races, seven different languages. But we live together in Niafunké." When Touré was ten (around 1950), he started playing the instruments he calls his teachers: a small one-string guitar called njurkel and the tiny njarka fiddle, a fist-sized gourd with a foot-long neck for its thin gut string. In 1956 he discovered the guitar and began to play it with encouragement from Fodeba Keita, founder of Guinea's Ballet Africaine.  Keita impressed him with the idea that you could use music to teach culture and history, and this seemed to Touré a good reason to bend the rules about noblemen playing music.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre