Rabah Driassa

Rabah Driassa was born in Blida, south-west of Algiers, on 19 August 1934. He began his career as a singer in 1953, after working in other trades; before music he was a miniaturist and painter. Over the following decades he became one of the most popular voices in Algeria. Drawing on the bedoui song of the high plateaus and mixing it with other Algerian styles, he created a form of popular music that was easy to sing along to and rooted in the country's oral poetry.

His repertoire runs to more than a hundred songs. Among them, Nedjma qotbiya ("The North Star"), Yahya wlad bladi, his version of the old love story Hizia, El Goumri and Mabrouk alina were sung at weddings and family celebrations across the Maghreb, and after independence his patriotic songs became part of the national repertoire. He wrote and composed much of his own material.

Driassa was also a poet and a painter, and he exhibited his paintings in Blida and Algiers. His painting, much less known than his music, is the reason he appears in our lists of Algerian painters. He gradually left the stage at the end of the 1980s. He died at home in Blida on 8 October 2021, aged 87, and Algeria's culture ministry called him an innovative artist and an intellectual. His song Mabrouk alina later stirred a dispute when a Moroccan singer covered it, and his son Abdou Driassa, also a singer, took legal action.

His paintings are a minor chapter beside the songs, and we have not seen them published at length; the best way into his work is still to listen. That reading is this site's own.

Where to see the work

TSA Algérie and Le360 carried the news of his death and described his career; ask Blida's cultural directorate about exhibitions of his paintings. For more Algerian music, read about raï; for painting, see M'hamed Issiakhem and our lists of Algerian painters and Algerian artists.