Talking Blues: Notes and Dialogue between Africa and its Atlantic Diaspora

Talking Blues: Notes and Dialogue between Africa and its Atlantic Diaspora

by Kai Mora

*This essay is accompanied by a playlist that explores the sonic connections between West African, Northwest African, and African American music entitled: A Trans- Saharan Soul Train.

Blues, what is it? What does it mean, blues?. . .The roots and the trunk are here in Africa, the branches and the leaves are in the Western world. Here it is genuine . . .

Springing from the Roots

The blues of the United States South, born out of plantation slavery, was a genre that lent itself to a critical dialogue with the continent. No one understood this better than Ali Farka Touré, a pioneer in advocating for the links between the blues and Sahelian and Sene-gambian musical tradition—sometimes referred to as Africa’s bluesman. Because Touré maintained that these musical traditions were connected, the blues became a tool which linked Africa and its Atlantic diaspora both historically and more contemporarily in the 1960s and 1970s, when Black consciousness artists, political leaders, and scholars revived the intense interest in pan-Africanism. While African American orality, and particular stringed instruments like the Malian ngoni, Sengealese xalam, and the kora, found throughout the Sahel, were historically seen as solely the domain of a class of endogamous artisans commonly referred to as “gri- ots.” These griots, in turn, belong to a wider caste system of artisans known as nyamakala, who acted in complement, and at sometimes opposed, to the endogamous class of nobles, known as horon. These lines were (gen- erally but not always) not to be transgressed, making Touré’s musical career as a noble fraught with tension.

Nevertheless, Touré drew on the oral traditions and accompanying musical compositions performed by generations of griots. As Touré claims, these oral and musical traditions also found their way into African American blues traditions. This point, however, is debated by scholars such as David Evans in African American Music: An Introduction. According to Evans, there are several distinguished qualities of griots which can be found among African American blues musicians includ- ing “often itinerant existence, their perceived low social status, their preference for stringed instruments, the use of a declamatory and melismatic singing style, and their songs of frank social commentary.” However, he qualifies, “it would be wrong to view blues performers simply as biological or cultural descendants of griots,” as “most of these characteristics can also be found elsewhere in Africa,” and “elements from other African geographical traditions can be detected in the blues.” At the same time, scholars such as Samuel Charters contests this in Nothing but the Blues: The Music and the Musicians. He argues that “it is possible, in fact, to trace without a break in continuity,” the devel-opment of the blues through tracing the Sahelian and Senegambian origins of the American banjo, a critical instrument in the development of blues rhythms. He asserts that the blues and the banjo is thus one of “of the most vigorous survivals of the African cultural influence on American music.”

Like Evans, Gerhard Kubik, in his book, Africa and the Blues, begs to differ. He rejected Touré’s music resembling the blues, ultimately arguing that “it is uncertain to what degree [Touré’s] personal syn- thesis could be used to confirm pre-twentieth-century historical con-nections,” between music of the Sahel and the blues. A step further, he writes that the way Touré’s “predilections have been reinterpreted, and even exploited, is a long way from their original integrity and historical truth,” again reducing Touré’s claim to a mere marketing ploy, or a rhetorical device at best. He argues that when “mass media” and “Western-educated circles” in Timbuktu and Paris discovered him

…it is perhaps more crucial to examine the implications rather than the genuineness or accuracy of Touré’s claim to American blues traditions.

with the idea of the “‘roots of the blues’ in the Western Sudanic belt . . . there was suddenly a market for selling Ali Farka Touré as ‘The Source’ or the personified ‘Roots’ of the blues.” This had a significant impact on African American musicians, who became the inheritors and inventors of what musicologist Michael E. Veal called “trans-African” music in Punk Ethnography: Artists & Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies. According to Veal, when Touré became popular in the U.S. in the 1980s, the assessment of the blues “as musical evidence of African survivals in the Americas” stirred academia. Through the “confluent interests of folklorists, ethnomusicologists, cultural anthropologists, and cultural nationalist currents associated with civil rights and Black Power,” there was “gradual resignification” of the music [the blues] in trans-African terms.

While a clear lineage of the blues is likely to be a perpetual topic of conversation, it is perhaps more crucial to examine the implications rather than the genuineness or accuracy of Touré’s claim to American blues traditions. Indeed, Kubik admits that “Toure’s original interest in the blues is legitimate and perhaps [indicates] personally felt cultural affinities.” However, “personally felt cultural affinities” is a gross understatement. Touré’s musical advocacy emerged during a period of global Pan-Africanism and Black liberation politics and peaked during a consecutive era of mass West African migration to the United States. If it is challenging to draw a lineage directly from precolonial West African griot traditions to the formation of the blues at the end of the nineteenth century, it is easier to trace the chronological impact of the blues on West Africa in the twentieth century and later back to the United States with African migration at the close of the century.

From the Banjo to the Guitar

The emergence of the blues can be seen as a multi-step process. West African stringed instrument traditions brought to the plantations of the Caribbean basin would gradually culminate in what we now know as the banjo, its first known documentation typically ascribed to Irish traveler and collector Hans Sloane at the turn of the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, the banjo would reach a stable morphological form, indicating that the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade— that is, when generations of American-born Africans would begin to proliferate—helped solidify an African American identity. Around the same time, the blues as a genre also emerged, and thus, as Charters discusses, “many of the early blues styles were built on the rhythmic and harmonic patterns that had been developed and sustained on the banjo.” Gradually, however, with the rise of the minstrel industry in early nineteenth century U.S., the banjo fell out of favor with African American musicians because much of their “repertoire had been taken over by white performers,” becoming associated with their “pervasive racism.” It was also an artistic choice, Charters continues, as certain technological changes in the banjo arising from minstrelsy influence also contributed to the general exchange for the guitar, including “the higher pitch and tension of the strings, which could not produce a sustained note.” African American singing style, in contrast, “used lower vocal pitches and emphasized slower tempos, making the banjo’s short, bright ‘plink,’ awkward to sing against.” The introduction of the guitar solved this musical issue, and thus the blues and the guitar would be at the foundation of modern American music at the turn of the twentieth century.

Because of their central role in the evolution of the blues genre, West African stringed instruments, the banjo, and the guitar coalesced to bring modern American music to the fore at the turn of the twenti- eth century. When American rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm & blues became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, the exporting of both the guitar and the music went global, along with acts such as Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and John Lee Hooker. Hooker, Kubik discusses, a name with which Touré would often receive comparisons, experienced an “enormous resurgence of popularity” among both American and European audiences, especially after his 1970 collaboration with the rock ‘n’ roll group Canned Heat. Indeed, the blues overall was undergoing a revitalization in the 1960s. Veal describes the reemergence of the singer and guitarist Son House, “a legend of the Delta blues and a strong influence on iconic blues masters such as Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.” Veal argues that House’s reemergence and the release of his 1964 collection Father of the Delta Blues, was a “defining moment of the 1960s’ blues boom,” which afforded “older blues performers” the opportunity to receive “recording contracts and tours of America, Europe, and beyond.”

Meanwhile, West Africa would experience a separate but, in many ways, parallel evolution in modern music. In the colonial era of Africa, which constituted the first half of the twentieth century, West African orchestras were trained in genres of ballroom and latinized European-style genres. In addition to these genres, John Collins discusses in Music Makers of West Africa, one could also find among their repertoires “sea shanties and folksongs introduced by sailors of every nationality, including Black seaman from the West Indies and Americas.” As a result, the banjo and the genres associated with it, greatly influenced the development of modern West African music. Indeed, several influential West African guitar players during both the colonial and independence eras such as Hadj Sidiki Diabaté and Fodeba Keita, played the banjo in these colonial era orchestras. In his book Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa, Eric Charry discusses another key development: with the introduction of the guitar into West Africa by the 1930s, indigenous rhythms would be transferred onto the guitar within the next decade. These rhythms were originally played on indigenous stringed instruments associated with griots such as the ngoni, xalam, and kora. Just as indigenous rhythms gained traction on the guitar in the 1940s, the outbreak of the Second World War acted as a catalyst for the acceleration of modern African music. Charry writes that “foreign trends entered at a quicker pace, owing in part to the returning soldiers,” until finally, similar to what happened with the blues in the U.S., “the banjo was eventually dropped in favor of the guitar.”

with the introduction of the guitar into West Africa by the 1930s, indigenous rhythms would be transferred onto the guitar within the next decade.

Much of musical culture in Francophone  West  Africa  developed  in conjunction with one another. Mali (the homeland of Touré), Guinea, and the Senegambia shared the historical influence of Mande culture throughout the region. The Mande, one of the key cultural commu- nities of West Africa, have their origins in the Niger river bend, which enters where the desert and forest regions of Africa meet, otherwise known as “the Sahel” (meaning shore in Arabic). It is the Mande King Sundjata Keita who founded the Mali empire in the thirteenth century which led to an imperial configuration across the Sahel and Senegambia. This area was later assumed by the Songhay empire in the fifteenth century. Through commerce, politics, and spiritual practice, Mande identity was carried and transformed as it met other key cultural communities in the imperial region and beyond, including the Fulbe, Wolof, Tuareg, and Amazigh. As such, the musical traditions of these regions have obvious historical linkage. However, with the foreboding trade with Europeans peaking in the mid-seventeenth century, and the sacking of the Songhay empire by the Moroccans in 1591, trade pivoted from the desert routes of the North to the maritime routes of the coasts. Thus, Charry argues, on the one hand “cosmopolitan port cities” like Conakry (Guinea) and Dakar (Senegal) “attracted cultural influence and communities from Europe, the Caribbean, and other parts of coastal West Africa”; on the other hand, landlocked Mali “remained resistant to cultural influences arriving via the Atlantic–if not by will, then by geography.” As a result, the French colonial project largely neglected to document orchestras in Mali before independence. This is not to suggest that modern Malian music would not eventually encounter Atlantic influences, especially in the cosmopolitan city of Bamako—which had been a political, cultural, and commercial center for centuries before western European arrival. Despite the marginal role Mali would play in the early documentation of music in the region, it was the site of the earliest known written source that indicates the modernization of Mande music as it was transferred from indig- enous stringed instruments to the gui- tar: Fodeba Keita’s Chansons du Dioliba (1948), “a twenty- to twenty-five minute play consisting of one actor rendering Keita’s poetry accompanied by a guitarist” (Charry.)

Yet it would be Guinea in the 1950s, the first Francophone colony to gain independence, that trailblazed the modernizing of indigenous rhythms. Indeed, one way that Malian music was impacted by what was happening in Guinea was through the influential Keletigui Diabate, who “apprenticed as a guitarist” in the post-independence national Guinean Orchestre de la Garde Républicaine, before returning to indepen- dent Mali to “help form Mali’s own national orchestra.” Under Sekou Touré, Charry continues, Guinean musicians would form orchestras that “played modern renditions of traditional pieces as well as newly composed pieces using primarily European instruments,” including the electric guitar. Charry writes that electric guitars were “handed out, musicians were made civil servants, and their creations, recorded in the state-run Studio de la Voix de la Révolution, and distributed on the state Syliphone label beginning in the mid 1960s.” With the interwoven history of Mali and Guinea from the medieval era to the colonial era of the early twentieth century, the guitar created yet another inroad for trans-regional cultural diffusion. Charry notes that the European-based sounds of the colonial orchestra age gave way by the 1960s to “a distinctly Mande-based sound,” suggesting that indigenous cultures, which always lay beneath the surface at the root of West African society, were gradually emerging.

The format of the orchestra would remain a critical fixture in Guinea and Mali, which gained independence in 1958 and 1960, respectively. Indeed, while the ill-documentation of Malian orchestras pre-indepen- dence is an obstacle to understanding the formation of the nation’s modern musical scene, post-independence Malian orchestras offer a clue to their forebearers. Early independence Malian orchestras such as the Rail Band, Orchestre National “A”, and the regional orchestras of Kayes, Segou, Mopti, and Sikasso, Charry argues, were modeled on those of Guinea. One major venue that became crucial to modern Malian music was a restaurant attached to the hotel at the railway sta- tion in Bamako. Charry discusses how by the 1970s, the owner of the joint, Aly Diallo, “wanted something new” and thus tasked saxophonist, trumpeter, and ngoni player Tidiani Kone with forming a band that would emphasize the indigenous musical traditions of Mali. That band would become the Rail Band, formed “with the aim of ‘transposing’ traditional music onto modern instruments.” The critical point here is that modern Sahelian and Senegambian music evolved through contact with the guitar/electric guitar as well as a current of African indepen- dence that privileged indigenous musical traditions. The emphasis on indigenous musical traditions in post-independence Mali in particular, and the Black Atlantic influence became all the more important to create the conditions that would make Touré popular beginning in the 1970s.

The Rise of Touré

In 2002, Ali Farka Touré was visited by film director Marc Huraux, in his hometown of Niafunké. In it, Touré explains that Niafunké is a “corruption” of the word “Niafoïdié,” which means “children of the same mother” in Songhay. In another scene, the filmmaker(s) play a record for Touré, as he sits in anticipation playing his n’jarka, a one-gut string fiddle. No sooner than the first chord plays than Touré smiles: “C’est Otis.” He and his band members sit in analytical, perhaps nostalgic silence, lis-tening to Otis Redding’s 1967 hit record, Try a Little Tenderness. The camera pans directly behind Touré as he longingly looks down at the original vinyl copy of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in which Redding performed. In the upper corner, in addition to an image of Redding, one also spots Jimi Hendrix, who also starred in the festival and subsequently on the record. The moment is certainly compelling, as Touré advocated throughout his career that the blues of the American South is inextricably tethered to the music of the Sahel.

Touré advocated throughout his career that the blues of the American South is inextricably tethered to the music of the Sahel.

It is against the backdrop of the 1960s and 70s, with the presence of Black Atlantic influence and the artistic and political contours of African independence, that Touré’s musical theory about the genealogy of the blues would take shape. In 1954, at just age fourteen or fifteen, he left Niafunké for Bamako to become a docker. Just two years later he would have a fateful meeting with Fodeba Keita, the Guinean guitarist and musical director of the national dance ensemble. Nathaniel Berndt, in his 2015 dissertation Talking Timbuktu: Songhay Historical Symbols from Leo Africanus to Ali Farka Touré, relays Touré’s recollection of the moment:

I met Fodeba when he was playing guitar, some day in 1956; he was sitting on a doorstep somewhere and was telling his friends about various legends. I wasn’t living far away, and I had my monochord with me. That day affected me very much. I told myself ‘Fodeba Keita is a great guitarist, he is also a teacher, he helps people in their vocation.’ I haven’t been to school, but I know many legends and stories, and much of the history of Africa. Why can’t I become a guitarist as well, and try to make my desire come true to share this with others.

By the 1960s, Touré had become skilled on the guitar, transferring the melodies and techniques of the n’jarka and the n’goni. According to Berndt, in 1970, Touré would perform in the biannual festival La Biennale Artistique, Culturelle et Sportive as a co-leader of the 117-member regional Niafunké district troupe. Around this time, still according to Berndt, he traveled with Malian historian Amadou Hampâté Bâ around the country collecting local instrument and oral traditions, expanding the base of his own repertoire in the process. Touré’s tenure at Radio Mali, his involve- ment in state-sponsored orchestras, and his overall acceleration into stardom has yet to be thoroughly detailed. Radio Mali would also be the place where Touré’s career would take on new dimensions. It would be Touré’s involvement in the 1970s with the national Radio Mali that brought his music to large audiences (Charry).

African independence and Touré’s music also opened the pathway for other Malian musicians to foster an atmosphere of collaboration with diasporic musicians.

African independence and Touré’s music also opened the pathway for other Malian musicians to foster an atmosphere of collaboration with diasporic musicians. One critical example is the Malian jeli-turned- global star and kora player, Toumani Diabaté, who gained wider attention towards the end of the 1970s. Diabaté was an up-and-coming kora player who could trace his jeliya lineage back at least eight centuries. As told in one oral tradition described by historian Thomas A. Hale in Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music, Diabaté is a name directly embedded in a centuries-old lineage of nyamakala. According to the tradition, in the aftermath of the killing of a wild buffalo by two brothers of the Tarawéré clan (known in French as Traoré), the elder brother praises his younger brother in song for successfully hunting the animal, making him (the elder) the progenitor of this breakaway Diabaté musical and orality artisan clan.

However, as Jonathan Henderson writes in his own dissertation, Mande Music in the Black Atlantic: Migration and the Affordances of World Music Record Production, “one needs to go back only a single generation…to get a sense of the significance of Toumani’s birthright.” Henderson is referring to Diabaté’s father, Hadj Sidiki Diabaté, who “was among the first generation of kora players to introduce the kora to Mali.” Accordingly, Sidiki was a founding member of the Ensemble Instrumental National du Mali, which was “a post-independence initiative sponsored by the Malian government,” bringing together artists from Mali’s six administrative regions. So, by the time Toumani would begin to take up his father’s mantle at the end of the 1970s, he had been exposed to a range of indigenous and Atlantic influences. He recalls that in addition to popular Malian bands like The Rail Band, he also listened to “Guinea’s Bembeya Jazz, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Hallyday, and so on,” pointing to the rootedness of African American music in the region. While Touré was wrapping up his tenure at Radio Mali, Henderson tells us, Diabaté, at thirteen years old, would perform for the first time in public in 1978 “with the regional ensemble of Koulikoro (a town 60 kms east of Bamako).” By 1983, Dia-baté was making a name for himself through tours with the revered Malian jalimuso Kandia Kouyate. Diabaté, had also been working with the noted eth- nomusicologist and producer Lucy Durán, as well as the WOMAD music festival. Diabaté and Touré’s paths would officially cross at some point in the 1980s, when United Kingdom Arts Worldwide director, Anne Hunt, trav- elled to Bamako with Diabaté to seek out Touré after hearing the recordings he made in Radio Mali studios. After Hunt and Diabaté summoned Touré from his home in the north of Mali to Bamako via an announcement on Radio Mali, Touré traveled to London where he met Nick Gold, producer of Touré’s album The Source (1992).

Shades of Blue

Though their first official collaboration, In the Heart of the Moon, would come only in 2005, the careers and repertoires of Touré and Diabaté, col- lectively, brought modern Malian music to the world. Their acceleration into world-recognition would earn them the opportunity to collaborate with influential African American artists like blues musician Taj Mahal. In 1992 Touré released The Source which included features by Taj Mahal entitled “Roucky” and “Mahini Me.” In 1999, Diabaté would produce a full-length album with Taj Mahal, Kulanjan featuring a rendition of the popular African American folk song “Catfish Blues” (also famously covered by Jimi Hendrix), as well as songs like “Mississippi-Mali Blues.” However, in a 1994 interview with author Richard Trillo, Touré would have some sharp words on his own briefer collaboration with Taj Mahal:

Trillo: How did your collaboration go with Taj Mahal on “The Source”?

Touré: We had every imaginable problem. He couldn’t even manage to play or keep up. He was very tiring. Very tiring. But I liked him very much, because he really wants to understand. I like that about him a lot, he really wants to learn. It’s not that he understands what I sing. He can’t. No.

While Touré responded positively to the idea that the music of the U.S. South was connected to the music of his own culture, he also expressed doubt and criticism toward diasporic artists. On comparisons with John Lee Hooker, Touré quipped that Hooker “does not know the sources of his music” (Berndt). Touré, however, qualifies his remark, exposing an ambivalence rather than outright rejection. “I respect him and his genius as the translator of African music in the United States,” Touré says, indicating that he, in a sense, acknowledged Hooker’s Africanity.

Yet, keeping it at a distance, he continues, “but my music is the roots and the trunk, and he is only the branches and the leaves. These are our tunes, and he plays them without understanding them.” Roots, trunk, branches, and leaves have been powerful imagery in the dialogue between and about Africa and its diasporas. One might recall the opening lyrics to Bob Marley’s song “Roots” (1986): “Some are leaf, some are branches, I and I are the roots.” The tension is representative here: Marley, in the diaspora, makes an assertive claim to the root of Africanity, while Touré similarly maintained that he was the “root,” except he thus inserted a hierarchical distinction between a pure African sound and that which was across the Atlantic. But Touré’s position is perhaps indicative of his worldview, which emerges from a Sahelian societal structure where music is an enterprise passed down generationally, as opposed to African American bluespeople, who were not only dislocated from their ancestry, but who also freely participate in music without regard to a specific musical class. Moreover, Touré, came from a noble lineage, not one that produced musicians, and openly transgressed this status by becoming a musician. Touré’s understanding of the place of music in Sahelian West Africa and what it means to transgress that boundary perhaps informed his criticism. One might even say it’s a projection. Yet, perhaps from the vantage point of African American artists like Taj Mahal and John Lee Hooker, their birthright to the music traditions of West Africa is just as legitimate as Touré’s, and indeed Touré’s legitimacy as a musician can certainly be questioned from the point of view of Sahelian culture.

Touré escaped his class, but he could not escape the meaning of his hometown Niafoïdié, or “children of the same mother.” The blues and griot traditions, though separated by a literal ocean of history, were in fact of the same mother. Whether Africa and Africans have a claim to a pure, original sound, those musical traditions which found themselves in the diaspora, would return to the continent to inform the original sound. Indeed, Berndt writes “Touré consciously incorporated American blues and R&B over the course of his career,” and that it is “undeniable from his earliest recordings,” including “Hani” and “La Drogue,” “in which he quotes the well-known guitar line from Otis Redding’s ‘My Girl.’” In another example, in the title track of “Savane,” Touré sings:

I left my country and my Louisiana

But in other countries goodbye savannah I found the metro isn’t easy work,

But I am, I am a negro.

While African American traditions would come to influence West African rhythms and even forms of modern stardom, modernizing yet centuries-old West African musical traditions would also come to influence modern African American music. Indeed, collaborations like The Source and Kulanjan were just as much a part of Taj Mahal’s repertoire as they were Touré’s and Diabaté’s, respectively. However, the dynamic interaction between African American and West African musicians in the 1960s and 1970s was not just about the intangible movement of ideas and musical traditions, but of the tangible movement of peoples. Of Guineans to Mali and Malians to Guinea, of African Americans to West Africa, and of West Africans to the United States.

Music, Cold War Diplomacy, and African Americans in Africa

African independence movements were concurrent and interwoven with the Black liberationist and pan-African political atmosphere of the U.S. Veal discusses how with the “global discourse on Blackness,” happening in Africa and the U.S., “it was only a matter of time before the emergence of the idea of African ‘guitar heroes,’ borne of a moment of pan-Africanist idealism” played out in these other genres of music. If one viewed the introduction of the guitar, genres of (Black) American music, and the subsequent development of modern West African music “one-dimensionally, its introduction might seem a marker of Western musical imperialism.” However, Veal continues, the evolution of music in Africa “has been prismatic”—that is, engaged in “syncretic dialogue between Western popular music and indigenous traditions.” With the introduction of the guitar into West Africa, the guitar acquired “many subtle shadings,” just as it had during the birth of the blues and rock ‘n’ roll in the U.S. Thus, independent Africa, he concludes, “was a constellation of guitar dialects carved out of the raw fusion of melody, rhythm, tone, and electricity.” This West African musical landscape
would be expanded in the 1960s, the rel- atively early years of the Cold War, when the U.S. administration launched an initiative known as the “jazz ambassadors.” Penny Von Eschen discusses in Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War how musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Arm- strong, and Duke Ellington were used by “U.S. officials” to pursue “a self-conscious  campaign  against  worldwide criticism of U.S. racism, [that strived] to build cordial relations with new African and Asian states.” However, with the multiplicity of Black musical forms proliferating in the 1960s, the State Department also deployed such musical forms as gospel, soul, and rhythm and blues as part of its campaign. The convergence of U.S. foreign policy and the (re)emergence of critical Black musical traditions exposed Africans to African American music. Von Eschen writes that “throughout 1965 and early 1966,” the U.S. “sought a strategy for confronting what they perceived as [President Lyndon] Johnson’s image problem in Africa.” Africa would thus be folded into the cultural foreign policy strategies that brought African American musicians all over Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In 1961, Armstrong’s band would perform in the last leg of their tour, which included Senegal and Mali. Von Eschen writes that “State Department officials” in Bamako, Mali, “celebrated what they saw as an effective challenge to criticisms of American racism: the ‘spectacle’ of Armstrong’s integrated band.” U.S. officials reported that Armstrong’s tour provided “‘many firsts’ for Mali including the ‘first major concerts of any kind ever held in Bamako . . . the first cultural presentation undertaken here by a foreign mission.’” Significantly, officials reported, the tour constituted the young Malian nation’s “first exposure to original American jazz and . . . their first glimpse of an American Negro.”

However, the first official initiative solely based in Africa was in April 1966, the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar. The festival was co-sponsored by the government of Senegal, UNESCO, and the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC), the U.S. wing of the French-based Society of African Culture. Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, “served as honorary chair of the committee overseeing American participation.” Thus, African American presence there could be seen, in part, as an extension of the U.S. political and public relations scheme. However, these African American artists would also develop their own agenda as their tours progressed; the imbalance between the U.S. propaganda and the lived experiences of African American artists would come to bear on how they engaged in musical and artistic dialogue in Africa. Von Eschen writes that while for many Black American artists, the sentiment associated with the festival was “animated by the ideas of Negritude advocated by Senegal’s poet-president Léopold Senghor.” Moreover, it was “a celebration of the formal and spiritual connections between African and Afro-diasporic art forms, reflecting both the African inspirations and international resonances of develop- ments in black American culture.”

Music, theater, and dance performances by African Americans at the festival blossomed into deeper engagements with the continent as a whole. The critical success of gospel singer Marion Williams at the festival, von Eschen writes, led to her becoming the “first American artist at Dakar to tour for the State Department.” Later in 1966, she performed in Kenya, Ivory Coast, and Niger. That tour’s success “led to a steady stream of U.S.-sponsored gospel, dance, jazz, and rhythm and blues performances on the African continent over the next several years.” Jazz is often cited as the center of these U.S. state department tours, but blues musicians also experienced a resurgence in Africa. Von Eschen writes that the U.S. administration “sponsored tours by Chicago-based blues artists Junior Wells and Buddy Guy and His Band in 1968 and 1969, respectively. The two would return to the continent as the Guy-Wells Blues Band in 1975 for a fourteen-country tour.” In his book In Search of Africa, Manthia Diawara reminisces how “Radio Mali’s promotion of Junior Wells and his Allstars as a group that played the hits of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and James Brown added to his excitement.” Moreover, Diawara asserts:

. . . to be liberated was to be exposed to R&B and to be up on the latest news about Muhammad Ali, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., all of whom were becoming an alternative source of cultural capital for African youth and creating within us a new structure of feeling.

Against a historical norm which privileges linearity, and just like the centuries-old polyrhythmic traditions known across West Africa, the layers and “shades” of musical tradition between continental and diasporic Africans are constantly reproducing itself with new meaning according to contemporaneous conditions. The blues is one such vivid example of a musical tradition that, in the early modern period, passed through and transformed in the Atlantic world, both in terms of rhythm and technology.

Crossing the Atlantic

Following this initial transformation in the Atlantic, it seems that this music found its way back to Africa, so to speak, just to once more be sent across the Atlantic in an ongoing dialogue. In her article, “Listening to Kora in New York City: Constructing Africa and Blackness in the United States,” Althea SullyCole writes that the first time a professional kora player travelled to the United States was as a part of Guinea’s national ensemble Les Ballets Africains’ “forty-eight-show run on Broadway in 1959.” In 1971, Gambian kora player Jali Nyama Suso was invited to teach at the University of Washington by ethnomusicologist Roderic Knight. That same year, Suso also joined African American author Alex Haley at the first “Manding Conference” at the school of Oriental and African Studies in London. At this conference, Haley announced that through a confluence of oral history by his grandmother, the aid of historian Jan Vansina, and a griot in the heart of the Gambia, he had traced his ancestry to a Gambian named Kunte Kinte—which would culminate in his historical fiction Roots. Suso’s arrival would be succeeded by several visits by other kora players from the Gambia, including Alhaji Bai Konte who notably appeared at the 1973 Newport Jazz Festival. Sullycole writes that “his music captured the attention of a number of well-known musicians and writers, such as Pete Seeger and Taj Mahal,” and as a result, “he may be credited as the first to make the kora more broadly visible in the United States.” In addition to visitors, Gambian kora players also relocated to the United States, the first being Foday Musa Suso who immigrated to Chicago in 1977, and notably collabo- rated with jazz artist Herbie Hancock in the 1980s. Gambian kora player Salieu Suso arrived in New York City in 1989, becoming “one of the most recognizable kora players in NYC not only because of his high-profile collaborations with artists like Randy Weston,” but also as a “regular fixture in the NYC subway system.” Finally, the Malian Yacouba Sissoko arrived in NYC in the mid-1990s, rising to “prominence after being featured on violinist Regina Car- ter’s 2010 album Reverse Thread.”

Why more Malians are not counted among the musicians who migrated to the U.S. remains to be seen. In his book Bamako Sounds: The Afropolitan Ethics of Malian Music, Ryan Skinner prompts us to consider the culture around immigration in Malian culture. Skinner writes that, “the refrain ‘exile is bad’ continues to be sung—indeed it is one of the most widely represented themes in Malian music today.” During the era which led up to independence in 1960, the rejection of the exile was related to the call to “return home” and “build the nation.” Moreover, “modern day songs of exile [were] cautionary tales, acknowledging the urgency of travel abroad while at the same time warning of the threats to local lifeworlds such travel possessed.” In a few words, Skinner writes, for a new generation of Malian artists, “‘Exile knows no dignity’ (tunga tɛ danbe dɔn), the saying goes, but, increasingly, neither does home.” That is, there is a political, economic, and social tension between cultural identity and nation-building and the opportunities which are offered by traveling abroad. Other influences on immigration might be seen in the centuries-old oral traditions which both Touré and Diabaté drew on and per- formed. For example, in the oral tradition of Sundjata Keita, the theme of exile followed by the triumph and redemption of return was central to the narrative. Notably, both Touré and Diabaté remained living in their hometowns, pointing to the significance of homeland and lineage that both includes and goes beyond national independence. Mali is a site of national pride, but it is in constant negotiation with history, identities, and boundaries, which were carved out prior to European arrival. Both Touré’s noble lineage and Diabaté’s jeliya lineage are perhaps centuries-old and transcend the colonial landscape of the early modern and modern eras. All of this is to say that one might consider how the perception and culture around immigration and/or “exile” in Mali impacted to what extent Malian musicians would physically show up outside of the continent.

A deeper study on the impact of African migration to the United States on Black American musical traditions is warranted, especially given the exponential increase in immigration since the mid-nineties. Emmanuel Akyeampong discusses how, in the mid-1990s, the demo- graphics of immigrants from West Africa largely switched from skilled laborers and professionals to refugees fleeing war from countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Whether skilled laborer, professional, or refugee, these Africans would have to negotiate a socio-political landscape of the U.S., which is largely marked by the intense binary application of Blackness and whiteness due to centuries of chattel slavery, planta- tion culture, and settler colonialism. However, in her article Sullycole perhaps inflates the degree of tension between continental African musicians who operate, willingly or unwillingly and in part, amongst a “Black American” musical landscape, and Afro-diasporic musicians who often draw or “mine” continental African traditions to inform their own repertoire. Sullycole’s position is not a total exaggeration, however: Akyeampong points to the gradual and at times ambivalent identification with Blackness among Africans. He writes in “Transformations in Global Blackness: African and African American Relations, c. 1960 to Recent Times,” (Transition T131) that earlier generations of African immigrants at the end of the twentieth century “held tightly onto their African nationalities and ethnicities.” However, the second generation and beyond aligned “with African Americans and struggle against the racial denigration of blackness.” They “pursued their trans- nationalism in different ways from their parents,” especially through “the patronage of the creative and performing arts on both sides of the Atlantic by this younger generation,” giving currency to a conception of “global blackness.”

While at times the tension between who is the root and trunk, and who is the leaf and branch seems to come to a head, it does not betray the over half a century of interchange of (musical) culture embedded in the context of shared political ideals and social values—in a few words, pan-African and Black liberation politics. In an interview with Skinner, Ablo Keita discussed how in the 1980s Modibo Keita, gave a bar and eatery in Segou, Mali, owned by the jeliya Keita family and currently run by Ablo, the name “Harlem City.” To Ablo, the name “represents négritude. It symbolizes respect for the Black race and African authenticity . . . it’s a sign of the bar’s Africanness.” This dialogue between continental and diasporic Africanity, was reinforced at Harlem City through a “tavern soundscape that include[d] the latest in Malian popular music, as well as Afropop classics (from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s) and African American soul (especially James Brown).” With the sign Harlem City “juxtaposed with the domestic sign, ‘Keitala,’” the name of the compound owned by the Keita family, Harlem City signifies an “Afropolitan social space in Bamako, at the intersection of tradition, kinship, and diaspora.” Blackness, Africanity, Négritude—all were streams of dialogue passed back and forth between the continent and the diaspora not just through political and economic ideology, but also through culture, especially music.

Though at times imperfect and ambivalent, Africans on the continent and the diaspora were in constant dialogue about what mutual liberation meant, and musicians were one manifestation of this. Yet, this modern musical dialogue cannot be siloed from the previous centuries of forced migration, slavery, and colonialism, which in many ways is responsible for such dialogue taking place. On the one hand, Africans in the diaspora would take the centuries-old musical traditions across the Atlantic Ocean and transform them through the forges of the New World experience. On the other hand, Africans on the continent battled cultural era- sure and settler colonialism, bringing their own centuries-old musical traditions through the forges of African independence, and innovating them according to contemporary conditions. Ali Farka Touré’s advocacy is thus important for more than its potential to offer historical, pre-trans-Atlantic slave trade lineage to the blues. Touré’s message would emerge among, and perhaps from, a wave of diasporic musicians who were developing a Black consciousness with Africa as a semantic center. During calls for decolonization, independence, and nation-building, Africans on the continent came to imbibe and share the sentiment of their counterparts in the diaspora. An examination of the blues illustrates how the tension between African identity and Afro-diasporic identity was, and still is, in constant negotiation with the sonic landscape; rhizomatic, Mobius-strip musical traditions in which beginnings and ends are hard to define continue to ensue. The image of Touré staring at an image of Otis Redding captures this perpetual dialogue in a moment.