Fatoumata Diawara: twelve songs, one for her father

“Dad… wait while I play you some of my little blues,” Fatoumata Diawara sings on “Tati Bakary,” before handing over the sound of the donso ngoni, the Malian hunter’s harp, as if music could close the distance between the living and the dead. The song carries her father’s name. Beside him she names the other departed too – Amadou Bagayoko of Amadou & Mariam, the kora master Toumani Diabaté. Private grief turns communal, the way one voice at a funeral becomes the whole room’s.

“Tati Bakary” is one of twelve songs on Massa, released June 5 on the label Nø Førmat! In July the album reached No. 1 on the Transglobal World Music Chart, a monthly ranking voted on by world-music journalists and radio programmers across dozens of countries. Co-produced with French pop musician Matthieu Chedid, known as -M-, the record reads less like a fusion experiment and more, as Afropop Worldwide put it, like the sound of an artist becoming fully comfortable in her own authority.

Diawara was born into a large family – her father had four wives and twenty-five children, and she was, in her own words, the black sheep among them. He still treated her as singular: she called him to talk through her dreams, and she calls him her best friend to this day. His death removed the one shield she had. On “Sigui” she sings directly, for the first time, about the tension a polygamous household leaves on its children – a subject, her brother told her, few artists her age take on without a filter.

She handles the harder material on purpose. “When I’m writing the songs, even if the meaning is very painful, I will always think of my audience,” she says. “People should dance to your problems. Then your show becomes a hospital. A therapy.” That same discipline shapes “Denko,” sung quietly in Bambara, about disabled children and the mothers left holding them when everyone else – family, employers, husbands – walks away: when a child is healthy, she says, he belongs to everyone; when he isn’t, he belongs only to his mother.

She picked up the guitar out of necessity, after a guitarist cancelled on her days before two shows in Paris and she decided the stage wouldn’t go dark. It has been part of her freedom ever since, she says. It’s the same freedom she’s trying to leave her own two children, whose childhoods she is guarding for as long as she can – even though she herself felt grown by their age – even if guarding it costs her their company, and them hers.