Ali Farka Touré had a complex relationship with success outside Africa. It came to him relatively late in life – he was nearly 50 when the music he’d been recording for a small French label since the mid-70s started attracting attention in Europe and America – and he never seemed entirely comfortable with it. His guitar playing was compared with that of blues legends including Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker, but he described the blues as “a type of soap powder”. He would occasionally collaborate with western musicians, but told one of them, Ry Cooder, that America was “a place of bad energy” and a “spiritual car park”. He sold hundreds of thousands of albums and won Grammy awards, but was always wont to simply vanish back to Mali. He followed his Cooder collaboration, 1994’s Talking Timbuktu, by disappearing for five years and threatening to give up music altogether: he seemed more interested in farming in the village of Niafunké, his home town, where he eventually became mayor.
