"When I was young, I was the best footballer in my region, the District of Kayes," says Boubacar Traoré, a.k.a. Kar Kar. "The name Kar Kar comes from a Bambara word, kari-kari. It means dodging with the ball."

Kar Kar has also been dodging musical stardom for most of his 50-odd years. From the start, he never really intended to be a musician. "My big brother was a musician," he recalls, "and he had a guitar. When he would go out, I used to play that guitar. I would play 'double-gamme' [literally 'double scale,' meaning thumb playing bass, and forefinger playing melody] One day my brother came in and said, 'I heard someone playing guitar. Was that you?' I said, 'No, it wasn't' me.'" But when his brother said the music he heard sounded pretty good, Kar Kar admitted it was him after all. "My brother was astonished. 'You are playing like the kora,' he said. 'But the kora has 21 strings and you only have 6. If you keep on going that way, you're going to be famous all over the world.'"

This prediction seemed on its way to becoming true in 1960 when Kar Kar recorded his first songs on national radio, and they became hugely popular. "Kar Kar Madison," "Mali Twist," and "Sunjata" were his mainstays, especially "Mali Twist," which Kar Kar says played like a national anthem, an ebullient expression of peoples' excitement about Mali, a new nation in the world. After a few years, though, Kar Kar decided that music did not add up to a profession. "I got married," he said. "Had two children. I became a noble. I played the guitar around the house, but only to amuse myself. I was a businessman in Kayes. People forgot about me. For twenty years, most people thought I was dead."

All that changed in 1988, when Kar Kar was rediscovered by a local producer who persuaded him to record a new cassette, "Mariama." The next year Kar Kar's beloved wife and muse, Pierette, died and the loss rocked his world. He moved to Paris and took work there, burying himself in the anonymity of an alien world. But it wasn't long before other Malian musicians found him and urged him to begin performing there. Soon afterwards, Stern's Africa released Mariama, and Kar Kar's long delayed rise to international fame began anew. Since then, Kar Kar has recorded three more international releases and toured the world. A private man by nature, Kar Kar still has mixed feelings about the musician's life. But all that seems to evaporate when he's onstage tickling bluesy, melancholy airs from his guitar and singing in a soft, world-weary voice accompanied only by a calabash percussionist. He did confess to Afropop that he enjoys meeting musicians on the road, especially blues and R&B musicians. Kar was and is a huge Otis Redding fan. He knows that foreign listeners hear a blues connection in his music, but he insists he's no blues man. "Blues is blues," he says. "It's American. But there is also blues in Europe and blues in Africa. The languages are different, but you can see that all these kinds of blues have the same parents--same father, same mother."

Contributed by: Banning Eyre