Wendo Kolosoy was one of the forefathers of modern African music, helping to invent the influential dance style known as Congolese rumba. The music later developed into soukous and made international stars of Kanda Bongo Man and Papa Wemba.

Born Antoine Kalosoyi in 1925 in the village of Mushie in the northern province of Bandundu in what was then the Belgian Congo, he was orphaned as a child and brought up by Roman Catholic priests. In his teens he worked as a dock hand and as a mechanic on a ship for the River Congo Transport Authority before turning to music in 1943: he claimed that his dead mother had appeared to him in a dream and told him it was his vocation to sing and play the guitar. By then he had moved to the capital Kinshasa (or Léopoldville as it was known at the time) and he began playing in clubs around the city with the band Victoria Bakolo Miziki, adopting the name Wendo Sor Kolosoy.

The second name was simply an adaptation of the one with which he had been born, but Wendo Sor — later shortened to Wendo — was supposedly in tribute to the Duke of Windsor. The reason for the homage is unclear, although the Duke was a close friend of the Belgian monarch, Léopold III (who, like Edward VIII, also subsequently abdicated).

For four years he was also a boxer, often fighting and singing on the same day. As his popularity grew he began broadcasting on Radio Congo Belge and in 1948 he was signed by Ngoma Records, one of a number of local record labels — mostly run by Greek entrepreneurs — to emerge in a booming postwar economy. Kolosoy's first hit, Marie Louise, came that same year and defined a style, characterised by a melodic and languorous guitars, Afro-Cuban rhythms that had become popular in bourgeois Kinshasa society via imported recordings and sung in the inter-ethnic trading language of Lingala.

With Henri Bowane on guitar and Kolosoy singing in an attractive croon with a trademark yodel, Marie Louise became a pivotal record in African musical history, winning a reputation among Congolese listeners for having supernatural powers that could raise the dead and heal the sick. This reputation earned the condemnation of the Catholic Church and, at the height of the song's popularity, Kolosoy was briefly imprisoned.

The style became known as la rumba congolaise and his early recordings helped to launch what became known as the belle époque of Congolese music, as his success led to a flood of 78rpm recordings by bands such as African Jazz and OK Jazz.

He continued playing and recording throughout the 1950s but by the time the Congo secured its independence from Belgium in 1960, his style was considered old-fashioned and he had been eclipsed by younger stars. He stopped recording during the 1960s and although he continued to perform, his style was rendered even more archaic as the lilting rhythms of Congolese rumba were speeded up and the music became known as soukous. As such it was one of the first African styles to find favour with European and American audiences during the onset of the world music boom in the 1980s.

He returned to the studio for the first time in almost 30 years in 1992 when he recorded Nani Akolela Wendo but his comeback really gathered momentum when he recorded an album for the French-based Indigo label in 1999. By then the Cuban veterans of the Buena Vista Social Club had become international million sellers and his album was marketed as a similarly timeless exercise in nostalgia, harking back to a long-gone, gentler era of acoustic African dance music. Inevitably, the album was called Marie Louise and included a remake of his most famous song. It was followed three years later by the album Amba on the French label Marabi. He eventually retired from performing in 2004.

Wendo Kolosoy, singer, was born in 1925. He died on July 28, 2008, aged 83