Amadou Bagayoko, a Malian guitarist and composer who with his wife, the singer Mariam Doumbia, formed Amadou & Mariam, inventing a broadly accessible sound that made fans of people worldwide who otherwise knew little about music from Africa, died on Friday in Bamako, Mali’s capital. He was 70.
His death was announced by the Malian government, which did not provide a cause. He and Ms. Doumbia lived in Bamako.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Amadou & Mariam was regularly described as the new century’s most successful African musical act.
Mr. Bagayoko, who grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, called their sound “Afro-rock,” and the group regularly combined his winding guitar solos with, for example, the pounding of a West African djembe drum.
Yet the group’s music also consistently evolved. Their breakout hit, the 2005 album “Dimanche à Bamako,” had chatty spoken asides, sirens, the hubbub of crowds — city sounds turned into melodies. Their 2008 album “Welcome to Mali,” conversely, embraced an electronic style of funk, opening with a song, “Sabali,” featuring Damon Albarn of the arty hip-hop group Gorillaz.
What was consistent was a sweet, graceful sound that still had the power to build to crescendos, with Ms. Doumbia’s alto achieving clear, pleasant resonance over a rich orchestration.
Mr. Bagayoko sang, too. The couple’s lyrics were mostly in French and the West African Bambara language. Politics inspired some of their songs, but they often identified local topics that could have more widespread appeal, as in their 2004 song “Sénégal Fast Food.”
Amadou & Mariam were often grouped into the much-derided genre known as “world music,” but whatever provincialism that term might seem guilty of, this was an era when many young Americans came to love African musicians, including the fellow Malians Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, who died last year. Around the same time, American stars like Bonnie Raitt and Ry Cooder made pilgrimages to Bamako to jam with local artists.
“What they do hearkens back to classic rock and real musicianship,” Jake Shears, the lead singer of the American indie pop band Scissor Sisters, told The Times in 2012. “Now with all bands, when you’re playing live, everybody’s got backing tracks going on. Everyone’s working with a net. They are a proper old-school rock band.”
The origins of that training and skill lay in the couple’s background. Each of their lives had, to a large extent, depended on music. Mr. Bagayoko and Ms. Doumbia were born with sight, but both became blind as children because of poor medical treatment.
Amadou Bagayoko was born on Oct. 24, 1954, in Bamako. His father, Ibrahima Bagayogo, was a bricklaying instructor, and his mother, Mariam Diarra, devoted herself to raising their 14 children.
Amadou was born milky eyed, with cataracts, but he went blind only gradually. A doctor later told his family that the boy’s real issue had actually been a trachoma infection addressed too late. It was also impossible in Mali then to get a cornea transplant, which could have saved Amadou’s vision.
“In those days,” Mr. Bagayoko wrote in the couple’s joint memoir, “Away from the Light of Day” (2010), “being blind was the worst thing that could happen to you in Malian society. It was tantamount to being a beggar.”
From practically his infancy, Amadou got used to “drowning his sorrows in music,” he wrote. He became good enough at the flute and harmonica for his teacher to ask him to play the Malian national anthem after class every day.
An idea formed in his young mind. “Music,” he wrote, “would be my passage out of poverty.”
Around the age of 13, an uncle began teaching Amadou the guitar. He soon realized he could differentiate guitars by manufacturer based on sound.
Before long, Amadou was playing with Les Ambassadeurs du Motel, one of Mali’s best-known musical groups. He also began attending the Institute for the Young Blind, Mali’s first modern school for the blind. A teenage girl there was highly regarded for her singing: Mariam Doumbia. She had been blind since the age of 5 from untreated measles.
Mariam showed Amadou lyrics she had written about the harsh reality of being disabled in Mali. Amadou began setting her songs to music.
They played together for years just as friends and collaborators. In 1980, dancing at a party, Mr. Bagayoko declared that his true feelings for her were romantic. Ms. Doumbia kissed him. “I felt the doors of paradise opening,” he wrote in their memoir.
Local news outlets covered the marriage of the two esteemed blind musicians. Concert promoters from nearby African nations began making them offers. They expanded their repertoire from their native Bambara to other languages like Tuareg and Senufo. Fans called them the Blind Couple From Mali.
By 1996, they were able to move to Paris and record an album there, now singing in French. That led to “Je Pense à Toi,” their first hit outside Africa.
The musical globe-trotter Manu Chao produced “Dimanche à Bamako” and helped write lyrics for some of its songs. The album sold more than 100,000 copies in France alone in just about a week and went on to become an international hit.
The couple gained prominent billing at American music festivals like Bonnaroo and All Points West, alongside bands popular in the mid-2000s like Radiohead, Kings of Leon and Animal Collective.
In 2009, they opened at several stadium shows for Coldplay. The same year, they performed at a concert in honor of President Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and they met Mr. Obama himself.
Their production wound down over the 2010s and 2020s, but they performed together as recently as last summer during the Paralympic Games in Paris. As of Sunday, their website still listed dates for a European tour in May and June.
Mr. Bagayoko and Ms. Doumbia had three children, including a son, Sam, who is also a musician, as well as several grandchildren. Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.
One of the couple’s last international hits was “Bofou Safou,” released in 2017. It had a paradox that seemed appropriate for a couple who had so fully devoted their lives to music. The lyrics admonish young men to focus less on dancing and more on working — yet the cheerful, groovy beat challenges you not to dance.
