Mali to Memphis is a journey from the heart of an ancient West African kingdom to a city where American black music came into its own, from the sandy banks of the Niger River to the levees of the Mississippi. These songs do not unlock the secrets of Delta blues or Malian spirit music. But there is a kinship between these musicians, and their art reveals that fact in loud, living, present-tense terms, even as it invites us to contemplate the unsolvable riddles of the past. Mali is an enormous, landlocked country that fills the interior of West Africa. It stretches from the Sahara desert in the north, to the edge of the coastal rain forests in the south. The country's biggest waterway, the Niger River, winds its way northward from Guinea, through the Malian capital, Bamako. It continues up to Segu, center of the old Bambara Empire and ancestral home to many artists on this compilation, and then on to Timbuktu at the edge of the Sahara.
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