The town of Boudefo, near Kita, is a seat of Manding griot lore. Tounkaras have lived there since the time of Sunjata Keita, founder of the 13th century Manding Empire. As the story goes, King Tounkara of Ouagadou harbored the future monarch during his youthful period of exile. Most of the Tounkaras who live in this area are griots, or jelis, people whose ancestry gives them the right and responsibility to play traditional music and sing the lineages of all the families in the region. Some believe that this artform--jeliya--is the glue that holds Malian society together, for it preserves peoples' awareness of themselves and each other.

Although Tounkara grew up in this highly cultural environment and played drums at social gatherings from his early boyhood, his parents didn't want him to become a musician. His mother preferred that he study the Koran and become a marabout, a scholarly Muslim cleric.

After Mali achieved its independence in 1959, Tounkara's uncle--the first Commandant of Kita--helped him to enroll in a French school, but six months later, his parents sent him unwillingly back to Koranic school. By this time, Tounkara had begun picking up his older brother Yeye's guitar and figuring out tunes. His first two songs were griot classics, "Sunjata," and "Lasidan." Soon, Tounkara went to the capital Bamako with a cousin who had married a Senegalese man there. On his first return visit to Kita to help with the harvest, Tounkara heard guitar music that his brother had learned in Guinea. "That was when I decided to really learn the guitar," he says. "Kita at that time was ahead of Bamako musically. In Bamako, there was nothing then. The groups there just played Cuban music."

In the era of Mali's first president, Modibo Keita, musical groups were sponsored by the state, with the proviso that they had to incorporate the country's traditional music into their sounds. While still in Kita, Tounkara and the regional band of Kita had taken first prize in one of the first state-sponsored competitions. Nevertheless, he moved on to the capital. Tounkara had little interest in bands at that time, but he did spend long hours learning Congolese and Cuban songs off the radio. "I took records by Johnny Pacheco, Ray Baretto, Celia Cruz, Joe Cuba on piano--fast salsa. Joe Cuba had one of the hardest songs around then, and I said, 'I'm going to learn that.' People said, 'You are crazy. You can't play the notes there.' But I got to the point where I could play it. When I listened to a Cuban record, I could interpret it correctly from the piano part. He was soon noticed and recruited into the neighborhood band, Misra Jazz.

"We played," Tounkara says, "but it didn't pay anything. My sister said I had to have a profession in addition to music. So I chose to be a tailor. A tailor in the neighborhood agreed to teach me. I'd sew a little, play guitar a little. It didn't work out." But Tounkara's playing in Misra Jazz worked very well, and he was soon recruited into the Orchestre National, where he accompanied Keletigui Diabaté, who would go on to become one of West Africa's most celebrated balafon players.

For Tounkara, these were good times in Mali. "With Modibo Keita," he recalls, "we had it in our heads that we didn't need the French. We could do things for ourselves, and until this day, I have that in my character." When Keita was overthrown and executed in a coup led by Moussa Traore, the new leaders of the country showed little of Keita's cultural enlightenment. "They threw everything into confusion," says Tounkara. "They broke up the Orchestre National, a great band like that! They broke everything Modibo had made--the national dance troupe, national band, national theater. Broken, broken, broken!"

In 1970, the Malian Railway Company sought to pick up some of the pieces by sponsoring a band that would play at the hotel next to the Bamako train station, the Buffet Hotel de la Gare. Djibril Diallo, the director of the Buffet, recruited a trumpet playing griot named Tidiani Kone to organize the band. The Rail Band spent two years recruiting Tounkara. He played with them briefly at the start, alongside their star singer, the young Salif Keita, but Tounkara was soon spirited away to Dakar where he played in the house band at the Miami club alongside champions of West African salsa like Orchestre Baobob and the Star Band.

At the end of 1972, Tounkara joined the Rail Band to stay. Salif Keita had left, but working with singers Mory Kante, and later Makan Ganessy and Lafia Diabaté, Tounkara became the star arranger and guitarist for the Rail Band during its glory years. As the 1980s progressed, the Rail Band lost its hold on the Bamako public, electrified as they were by the rise of singing griot stars like Ami Koita and Kandia Kouyaté, and later, Wassoulou diva Oumou Sangare. Meanwhile, Europe discovered the Rail Band, largely thanks to French producer and promoter Christian Mousset, who organized the band's first European tours in 1991 and 1995 and recorded three albums with the band.

These days the Rail Band is privatized--no longer owned by the Buffet Hotel de la Gare--and it plays to a much younger audience in a club called Djembe. When the band made its first U.S. tour in spring 2001, it sounded reborn. The challenge of exciting young listeners has given it great energy and sharpness.