Totó la Momposina, celebrated Colombian musician, dies aged 85

Totó la Momposina, one of the most celebrated musicians in Colombian history, has died aged 85.

Her three children announced her death from a heart attack on Instagram. “Totó was a woman who, with her voice and extraordinary dedication, carried the culture and memory of the Colombian people to the far corners of the world,” they added.

With a lilting voice charged with an edge of toughness, Totó took various forms of Colombian folk music, including cumbia and porro, to broader international awareness. And her popularity has been maintained, with younger generations of Latin artists sampling her songs.

Among those paying tribute was Colombian president Gustavo Petro, who described her as “my dear friend and a luminary of Colombian Caribbean art and culture … may she soar high to the stars”.

She was born Sonia Bazanta Vides in 1940 in the small town of Talaigua Nuevo in northern Colombia, to a family featuring multiple generations of musicians. After the family moved to Bogotá, she took on the stage name Totó la Momposina, Totó being her childhood nickname and Momposina a reference to the Mompós region where she had been raised.

By the late 1960s she was performing in her own band, Totó La Momposina y Sus Tambores, and her reputation in Colombia built to the point where she was invited to perform a concert residency at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in 1974.

But in 1979 she discovered she was blacklisted in Colombia for leftwing political leanings, and she became a refugee, fleeing to France and falling in with a musical collective there. “I sang in the streets, in restaurants, on street corners, in markets, in the Métro, everywhere,” she said.

She joined the cultural delegation accompanying Gabriel García Márquez as he accepted the Nobel prize for literature in 1982, and her recording career began the following year with debut album Cantadora. But it was through a partnership with Peter Gabriel’s label Real World Records that she found a broader international audience, beginning with 1993’s La Candela Viva.

As she was raised not far from the northern Colombian coast, Totó’s music had a culturally rich blend rooted in African and Indigenous sources and with a huge rhythmic variety: she hopped between sub-styles such as chandé, mapalé, fandango, puya and bullerengue.

Totó had an evangelistic fervour about Colombian music and dedicated her life to spreading it more broadly. “It had to be done,” she told Songlines magazine in 2023. “People need music to identify themselves; it dignifies them.” Elsewhere she said: “While I respect the word ‘folklore’, to me it means something that’s dead – in a museum. Traditional music, or the music from the old days, is still alive: many people are working with it and it’s always evolving.”

In later years she spent time in the UK and returned to Colombia, although she continued to tour the world. In 2013 she was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Latin Grammys, and in 2016 she was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.