How Totó La Momposina became the Queen of Cumbia

When I last interviewed Totó La Momposina in 2015, I asked her why she had made it her life’s work to popularise cumbia. “I didn’t choose it to be commercial,” she replied, “but because it had to be done. Every time you perform you have to do better because people need music to identify themselves; it dignifies them.”

It’s this drive to perform and engage audiences that has been at the heart of a career that has now drawn to a close, as in September her family and management announced her retirement, due to Alzheimer’s disease. At 82 years old, it’s remarkable looking back at what she has achieved, especially considering the obstacles in her way: civil wars, Colombia’s indifference to folk music, a need to adapt to new environments, not to mention all the discrimination she has faced as a female Afro-Indigenous performer in an industry that has struggled to offer equality. This is her story, in the words of La Momposina and those who know her well, of becoming the ‘Queen of Cumbia.’

Totó la Momposina on tour in Europe in the 1970s

La Momposina was born Sonia Bazanta Vides in 1940 in Talaigua, a village on the Magdalena River. Her father nicknamed her Totó – “it was the only word that I could pronounce well,” she laughs, “a banana was a totó, an apple was a totó.” The rest of her artistic moniker came from the wider region in which she grew up, Mompós. “We did not have to attend a marketing course to come up with the name,” she chuckles. She started performing when she was eight. “My mother was determined that her children would be proud of their Afro-Indigenous identity, so she formed a group called Danzas del Caribe in the 1950s and that’s how I started singing.”

By that time, La Momposina’s family had moved to Bogotá after her father was wrongfully imprisoned during the political persecution and brutality of La Violencia, a violent ten-year civil war that displaced close to ten million Colombians. Totó remembers, “we had to leave everything we had, [our] shoe-making workshop, our house, our friends and put the few possessions that we had on a truck to go to a city totally unknown to us, where we had to face many difficulties, since at this time there were not many people of our culture and colour.”

La Momposina’s parents were musicians and dancers, and she had a musical upbringing, with students and musicians from the Caribbean coast regular visitors to the family home. “In Bogotá, there weren’t any cultural centres. Our house was the centro cultural de Bogotá.” With her family she performed on TV and for diplomats, doing whatever they could to get their music heard.

She formed her own group, Totó La Momposina y Sus Tambores, in 1967. They performed a repertoire that stemmed from her research into the rhythms and traditions that flowed down the Magdalena River, passing though her home town of Mompós and along the coast. It’s this region, originally inhabited by Colombia’s Indigenous peoples and later, once it became an important colonial trading route, by Europeans and Africans, that is the cradle of Colombian cumbia, as well as sister genres like chandé, mapalé, fandango, porro, puya and bullerengue. La Momposina and her group would perform these styles in fiestas and during shows, with La Momposina adopting the role of cantadora, a matriarchal female singer improvising in couplets.

Totó la Momposina on Colombian TV in 1992 (photo: Juan Camilo Segura)

As her reputation grew, La Momposina began performing outside of Colombia and in 1974 Delia Zapata Olivella (an important researcher and documenter of Afro-Colombian music) took her to New York to perform at Radio City Music Hall. “We played between 160 and 200 concerts with four performances a day for two months, doing the same show,” she remembered. “It was a really tough experience. I almost threw in the towel. Fortunately, I stuck with it as I learned so much.”

Her first invitation to Europe came when AirFrance asked her to perform as part of a promotion of Colombian gastronomy at a restaurant in Montparnasse, Paris. She was accompanied by the anthropologist Gloria Triana who recalls, “it was an unsuitable setting for singing, since the French only wanted to talk while they ate. They asked for the volume of the drums to be lowered and Totó cried during the intervals.” But she didn’t give up, returning to Europe for shows in Germany, Poland, Switzerland and the Soviet Union.

When she discovered that she was on a Colombian governmental blacklist for left-wing connections, she decided to head to France indefinitely, arriving in Paris with three of her musicians, including the legendary percussionist Batata. With no money or place to stay, they were taken in by Le Collectif de la Rue Dunois, a group of mime artists and street musicians, who quickly involved them in their regular theatre shows.

Laurent Berman was one of Le Collectif and remembers taking La Momposina and her musicians on a tour of southern France: “Together we created a true festival, featuring French, Yiddish and Colombian music, a barrel organ, a children’s show with a merry-go-round, a moving cinema in a truck, an English double-decker bus, and even a hot-air balloon. Totó was a great success everywhere.”

Totó la Momposina on Colombian TV in 1992 (photo: Juan Camilo Segura)

“In France, I sang in the streets, in restaurants, on street corners, in markets, in the métro, everywhere,” says La Momposina about her time there. It was in France, too, that she met Carlos Arguedas, a Bolivian musician who agreed to record her debut album, Colombie (1984).

Another notable event happened in 1982 when she was invited as part of a Colombian entourage to perform in Stockholm when Gabriel García Márquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian writer Julio Olaciregui vividly remembers meeting La Momposina during this time: “I did not imagine that Totó, who cast a spell on me in Barranquilla in the 70s, would cure me sometime later, in Paris, of homesickness, that climatic phenomenon stirred with nostalgia, an indefinite malaise, far from the sea. Guided by her, I returned to the Magdalena River. I will always see Totó dancing barefoot, in a trance to the drum of Batata, on stage at the Maison de la Radio.”

After France, La Momposina moved back to Colombia – “I was falling prey to ethnomusicologists and needed to recharge my batteries” – before establishing herself in the UK. At first, she was invited to a get-together of musicians at Real World Studios in 1991, where Richard Blair was working: “I was walking past a live room, and I heard something deep and heavy going on,” says Blair. “I crept in quietly and there was Totó dressed in bright colours, very imperious and poised and graceful. Initially the first thing I heard had a Caribbean vibe, it was almost like a ghost of some old King Tubby record, but it was wilder and looser, and more ancestral somehow. It was only hand drums and vocals, and I was absolutely transfixed. It completely electrified me; I’d never heard anything quite like it.”

Totó la Momposina in Cartagena (photo: Josh Pulman)

When La Momposina returned to the UK the following year, Blair was the engineer on La Candela Viva (1993). It was during the recording of that album that she met John Hollis, who she persuaded to be her manager and push her music to the next level. “Having worked in Senegal, where traditional music was at the heart of culture and society, I found Colombia something of a shock,” remembers Hollis. “It felt like a country ill at ease with its Afro-Indigenous identity, a culture that looked to North America as a society to aspire to, with a record industry fixated on shallow commercial musical formulae and no interest in the great richness of traditional music it could have been developing into a formidable force.”

After unsuccessfully offering La Candela Viva to all the major labels in Colombia, Hollis had almost given up when he found the smaller label MTM, and, after 25 years of her career, La Momposina finally released an album in her home country.

Over the next ten years La Momposina toured the world, released a succession of lauded albums, and received awards across Europe and the Americas for her patronage of Colombian folk music, so that by the beginning of the 21st century she was able to return to Colombia a household name.

Since then, her music has continued to affect new generations, with break-out Colombian artists like Bomba Estéreo, Lido Pimienta and La Perla, as well as diasporic acts La Rueda and Akolá Tambó, all paying their debt. “She, with a few others, really kept cumbia alive, she protected it, in its purest form, for a long time,” testifies Richard Blair.

Totó la Momposina (photo: Yann Rabanier)

“When one makes music, ancestral music, you don’t make it so that it’s great for, how do I say, an anthropologist or philologist to listen to,” La Momposina told me back in 2015, “it’s so that what they are listening to has meaning, a real meaning, not just a feeling, but a sense of belonging and not for one to become fashionable, because ancestral music will always be in fashion.”

Through immense willpower, aided by a surfeit of dignity and humility, La Momposina has proven that which we should all have known from the start: the enduring relevance of our ancestral music. That’s a fine legacy.

This article originally appeared in the January 2023 issue of Songlines magazine. Life is better with great music in it – subscribe to Songlines today