Louisa Tounsia

Louisa Tounsia (; 1905 – 1966), born Louisa Saadoun, was a Tunisian singer. Active from the mid-1920s until the 1960s, she became one of the first North African performers to achieve wide prominence in the Maghreb and France. Her repertoire included both Tunisian subgenres of traditional Arabo-Andalusian music as well as modern styles of popular Arabic music, which she recorded for major record companies of her time.

Biography Louisa Tounsia ("Louisa the Tunisian") was born in a Jewish family in Tunis, then part of the French protectorate of Tunisia, in 1905. She was part of a wave of Jewish female artists who shaped the popular music scene in Tunisia and beyond after the death of the country's first superstar Habiba Msika. Her career as a popular singer started in the mid-1920s, and by the 1930s she became known as Tunisia's new female star of popular music.

Like many performers of her generation, Tounsia participated in the rapid expansion of the recording industry during the mid-20th century. Comprising both subgenres of the Arabo-Andalusian music tradition and lighter popular forms that appealed to urban audiences, this repertoire reflected the changing musical tastes in the Maghreb. Between the two world wars, Tounsia's songs were celebrated in newspaper coverage and record label publicity as expressions of modern Tunisian music. In 1931, she toured Morocco which was called “a triumph of unprecedented proportions” by the newspaper L'Echo d'Alger calling her "Tunisia's first superstar". Her song "Chérie, combien je t'aime" ("Darling, how much I love you") was later covered as "Elli yachek hram" by Reinette l'Oranaise, and also by Lili Boniche. Among other well-known songs in her repertoire is her 1945 recording "Ala Bab Darek" ("At the Door of Your House"), a song that was later covered by Tunisian musician Emel Mathlouthi.

These commercial recordings helped promote her performances throughout the Maghreb and Europe. During her visits to Paris, Tounsia performed at the Al-Djazaier and the Tam-Tam cabarets in the Latin Quarter that was run by the father of the prominent Algerian singer Warda. She died in 1966. Her surviving records are preserved in public and private collections and continue to be studied by historians of Arabic music and the early recording industry. The Tunisian National Sound Archive at the Centre of Arab and Mediterranean Music in Sidi Bou Said holds a collection of Tounsia's records from 1929 to 1945. Records from her later career between 1949 and 1962 are kept in the archives of the French National library. Some of her recordings have been reissued on CD and are available on online video and streaming platforms.

French writer Jonathan Saadoun published a biography titled Le destin de Louisa (The Destiny of Louisa) in 2026. Based on his research, the author aims to recall the life and career of this "monument of Oriental and Andalusian music".

In his 2017 PhD thesis Jews, Music-Making, and the Twentieth Century Maghrib, music historian Christopher Silver gave a detailed account of Tounsia's career and the changing character of the musical scene in Tunisian society. Among other aspects, he commented on a picture of her on the cover of the Columbia Records 1931 Tunisian record supplement: Dressed both in traditional and modern European clothes, Silver noted how Tounsia exemplified the image that record companies sought to convey: North African music as a contemporary musical form, shaped by both local and European cultural influences.