Oumou Sangaré is a Grammy Award-winning Malian Wassoulou musician of Fulani or Fula descent. She is often referred to as "The Songbird of Wassoulou". Wassoulou is a historical region south of the Niger River, where the music descends from age-old traditional song, often accompanied by a calabash.
Sangaré at Madrid, Spain, 2018
Sangaré performing at the Cambridge Folk Festival 2009
At WOMEX 2017
With her award at WOMEX 2017 in Katowice
Bambara, also known as Bamana or Bamanankan, is a lingua franca and national language of Mali spoken by perhaps 14 million people, natively by 4.2 million Bambara people and about 10 million second-language users. It is estimated that about 80 percent of the population of Mali speak Bambara as a first or second language. It has a subject–object–verb clause structure and two lexical tones.
Page from Francis Delaforge's Grammaire et méthode Bambara (1949)