Totó la Momposina obituary

Celebrated Colombian folk singer who introduced her country’s music to an international audience

Wearing wildly colourful dresses and headscarves, and with her powerful, rousing voice often backed only by drums and vocal choruses, Totó la Momposina, who has died aged 85 after a heart attack, became an international celebrity by reviving the folk music of Colombia.

She set out in the late 1960s and 70s to popularise music that was disliked and unfashionable in Colombia, and two decades later had become known as the “queen of cumbia”, a style that developed from a fusion of the music of African people taken to the Caribbean as slaves with the songs of the country’s Indigenous population and of Spanish colonialists.