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.

Her breakthrough came in 1993, when she released the album La Candela Viva on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label in the UK, and became a celebrity on what was then called the world music scene.

From then on she toured the world, playing in concert halls and festivals, including many Womad events. After a 25-year career, she at last had an album released in Colombia. She always encouraged Colombians to appreciate their own culture. “We have a wonderful country,” she said. “But a nation without music would be a people without identity.”

Sonia Bazanta Vides, as she was originally known, was born into a family with African-Colombian and Indigenous roots, in Talaigua, a village on the Magdalena river in the Mompós region of Colombia.

Her father, Daniel Bazanta, was a shoemaker and drummer, and her mother, Livia Vides, was a musician, singer and dancer. Encouraged by her parents, Sonia began performing when she was six, and as a teenager travelled across Colombia learning different regional styles and studying the art of the cantadoras, the women who would sing while pounding corn or washing clothes in the river.

The family were forced to move to Bogotá during La Violencia, a period of armed conflict between the government and guerrilla groups between 1948 and 1958, and there in the capital Livia started a dance group and made the family home a meeting place for musicians and students.

Sonia studied at the National University of Colombia and in 1967, now calling herself Totó la Momposina (using a childhood nickname and a reference to the area where she grew up) formed her own group, Totó la Momposina y Sus Tambores. She was taking the role of a cantadora, singing in the different musical styles she had learned on her travels, including cumbia, mapalé, porro, puya and bullerengue.

She played at parties and fiestas, and in 1974, in a show sponsored by the Colombian Coffee Federation, travelled to New York, where she was hired to sing for four shows a day for two months at Radio City Music Hall. In June 1979 she moved to Paris, after receiving a tip-off that her life was in danger because of her leftwing connections in Colombia. She spoke no French, had no money and survived by singing in the streets, helped by a collective of mime artists and musicians.

In 1981 she recorded her debut album in Paris, with help from a Bolivian producer, and she stayed in the city to take a music course at the Sorbonne University, surviving by busking in the street or on the Metro.

In 1982 she was part of the Colombian delegation accompanying the author Gabriel García Márquez to Stockholm when he received the Nobel prize for literature. She performed in front of royalty and diplomats, and Queen Silvia of Sweden sent her a message: “Never stop singing.” Two years later she made her first Womad appearance in the UK, singing at an early festival held near Bristol.

In 1991, she and her band were invited to take part in a recording week at Gabriel’s Real World studio in Wiltshire, alongside 75 other international artists. They proved to be massively popular playing live, and recorded several songs (one of which, Soledad, appeared on the compilation set A Week in the Real World (1992).

Phil Ramone (famed for his work with Paul Simon and Billy Joel) produced three of her most popular songs during these sessions – Dos de Febrero, El Pescador and La Candela Viva – the third of these became the title track of the album that transformed her career. She was invited back the following year to record further tracks to complete that album. Later albums included Carmelina (1996), recorded in Colombia with brass backing, and Pacanto (1999).

In 2015 Real World celebrated her 75th birthday with Tambolero – a remixed version of La Candela Viva that included unreleased songs from the original sessions and additional recordings. The new album included performances from all three of her children, with her son Marco Vinicio, now her musical director, playing percussion, and her daughters, Angélica María and Eurídice, joining the chorus vocals, along with two of her grandchildren. They appeared on stage with her that year, playing percussion, singing and dancing in the rain at the Womad festival in Charlton Park, Wilsthire.

She made her final UK appearance at the Tropical Pressure festival in Porthtowan, Cornwall in 2018, and retired from live performance in 2022, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Her songs have been sampled by many artists, including Jay-Z, Michel Cleis and Timbaland.

She won two Latin Grammy awards (song of the year and record of the year) for Latinoamérica (2011), as well as a lifetime achievement award in 2013, and in 2016 she was made a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.

She is survived by her children, from her marriage to Hernando Oyaga, which ended in divorce, and nine grandchildren.

• Totó la Momposina (Sonia Bazanta Vides), singer and dancer, born 1 August 1940; died 17 May 2026