Much has been written about the blues, its gallery of reluctant, hard-drinking showmen and their lo-fi recordings. Relatively little is known about their earlier incarnations among the slave communities of Louisiana and the Mississippi delta. Even less certain is their music's African roots, a genealogy which runs from the 17th and 18th-century slave deportations right back to the assimilation of Islamic culture in western Africa centuries earlier. The blues is arguably the genre of music that has most influenced western popular culture. To discover the source of the blues would be to find the holy grail of pop.
Ali Farka Touré, Malian musician and composer, who died on 7th March, symbolises part of that quest. Nicknamed the "Malian bluesman" and the "John Lee Hooker of Africa," Touré was often cited as the first African to blend his own musical traditions with 20th-century Mississippi blues. Born on the banks of the river Niger in northwestern Mali, he grew up absorbing the ancient music of the local griots, a caste of hereditary musicians who sang of spirit ancestors and their noble deeds. He soon mastered the local instruments—the single-string djerkal lute, the ngoni four-stringed lute and the njarka violin—on which he played the polyrhythmic, cyclical grooves for which the Niger region was known. But it was after hearing Keita Fodeba, the Malinké virtuoso guitarist, play that Touré found his true calling—the guitar.
In the late 1960s, Touré began listening to recordings of American blues and soul men which were slipping into the Malian capital Bamako, musicians like James Brown, Albert King and Jimmy Smith. On hearing John Lee Hooker for the first time, Touré was amazed at how similar some of the playing was to his own. Although he always denied being influenced by the blues, it was this resonance with his own, highly personal adaptations of Malian music that was to win him acclaim in France, Britain and ultimately the US. Here he achieved celebrity status on the world music stage, receiving a Grammy for Talking Timbuktu, his 1994 collaboration with Ry Cooder, and another this year for In the Heart of the Moon.
Musicologists are wary of the claim that the blues descended directly from the traditions of Mali, neighbouring Guinea and Senegal. Records do show that many slaves were transported from this region of west Africa to the new world, and there is evidence indicating that the ship's crew brought lutes, flutes and drums to prevent slaves from dying of misery on the treacherous voyages. On the scattered settlements of the Atlantic coast, copies of these native instruments would have been fashioned with new materials and passed down the generations. But the idea that they kept on playing traditional west African music until, three centuries later, the blues popped out is not plausible. Slaves had limited free time, and gatherings involving music were often banned. Drums, too, were generally forbidden. Attempts at converting slaves to Christianity would have interfered with their own beliefs, though these attempts were often resisted. And it wasn't until much later, after the American war of independence, that most slaves were moved from their coastal homes to work the cotton farms of the Mississippi where the blues finally emerged. It is hard to imagine what effect such upheavals would have had on the collective musical memory.
Nevertheless, there are some obvious similarities between the blues and the traditional music of the griots. Both genres are predominantly literary, their subject matter a wealth of melancholy and loss: take away the storytelling, the complaints and gibes, and an instrumental "There's a red house over yonder" would soon lose its appeal. Moreover, the appearance of the devil, a regular occurrence in blues folklore, is not an unfamiliar scene on the banks of the Niger.
Despite Ali Farka Touré's own observation—that the music he grew up playing held the key to the blues—traces of the American genre in his own recordings are technically difficult to identify. Very occasionally he used the trademark slide and hammering techniques of blues guitarists. But rhythmically he was more attuned to Arab-Islamic traditions than the offbeat patter of the Delta bluesman. And where was the bending of strings to find those "blue notes" so characteristic of southern misery?
Touré's claims also came at a time when Alex Haley's Roots was taking America by storm. Black America was being given a new, more African identity, and the more proof, however tenuous, the better. Meanwhile African countries were enjoying the caché of this link with sophisticated American culture. In the excitement, some African groups were even labelled "jazz," though they had never played a lounge bar in their lives. African-American culture was feeding back on itself, and far from finding clear evidence of its cultural roots, was influencing the very culture from which it came.
Whether Touré's relationship with the blues was an inspired marketing ploy or an authentic legacy is hard to determine. Martin Scorsese valued his contribution to the genre enough to cast him in his blues documentary, Feel Like Going Home, released on DVD a week before his death. For some, though, Touré's music is blues only in name. By nature it will endure as one of the most unique and heartfelt expressions of specifically Malian musical traditions.
