Cheikha Rimitti, who has died suddenly in Paris at the age of 83, was one of the true legends of the Algerian Rai music scene, and one of the greatest female singers of the Islamic world. She had just released a new, much-praised album, N'ta Goudami (Face Me), and two days before her death gave a sell-out concert to 4,500 in Paris.

Her plans for the summer included a London concert in August as part of the BBC Proms season. As her new album shows, she was still a powerful and feisty singer, who could produce rousing dance music that was far more exciting than the work of many of the younger, more commercially minded Rai contenders. It was recorded in the Algerian seaport of Oran, where the rousing and often rebellious Rai music scene started; she took the typically defiant step of working there although her music was at one time banned in Algeria, due to her outspoken lyrics about sex and alcohol.

Her new, self-written songs still dealt with passion or death, and though many start slowly and thoughtfully they develop into a full-tilt dance work-out, with her gutsy vocals matched against an all-Algerian band playing keyboards, accordion, flute and insistent percussion. With songs like these, and a new record company - the Paris-based Because Music label - to promote her, it seemed she would become one of the success stories of the year - especially when young audiences outside France and Algeria came to hear her difficult and remarkable life story.

Originally known as Saadia, she was born in the village of Tessala in western Algeria. Both her parents died when she was a child, and she survived by living rough, while working for French families or helping with the village harvest, before joining a troupe of traditional travelling musicians while still 15.

She never learned to read or write but became an accomplished dancer who delighted the crowds by such tricks as diving beneath galloping horses. She also started singing, but adapted the epic folk styles of her region into very different songs of her own, making use of everyday language and slang, while never, it seems, being hindered by her illiteracy. "Songs canter through my head and I tie them to my memorya" she once said. "I don't need paper or pen."

Her subject matter was equally brave, for she tackled tough, everyday themes such as escape from hardship - whether through emigration, excessive drinking or sex. Adopting the name Cheikha Rimitti during the second world war (the result, it seems, of an encounter with a French-speaking bartender and Saadia's pronunciation of the French word remettez), she developed an extensive following in Algeria.

In 1952 she recorded her first single, and two years later caused a sensation with her daring hit record Charag Gatta, which encouraged young women to lose their virginity. None of this impressed Algeria's first independent government when it took power in 1962. Rimitti's songs were denounced as "folklore perverted by colonialism".

Banned from appearing on television and radio for doing so under French control during the independence struggle, by the 1970s she was performing mostly for the Algerian immigrant community in France. Briefly returning to Algeria in 1971, she was badly hurt in a car crash in which three of her musicians were killed. Four years later she went on a hadj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, after which her lifestyle (though not her songs or subject matter) changed. She stopped smoking and drinking, but continued her singing and dancing, and by the mid-80s, when Rai was becoming established as the rousing dance music of angry young Algerians, Rimitti was being hailed as la mamie du Rai, the mother of the style.

She now saw young singers copying both her stance and many of her songs. But the Rai boom also gave her career a boost, as she gave concerts in Canada and Japan, and in 1994 collaborated with Robert Fripp on the album Sidi Mansour.

She leaves four children, all living in Algeria.

· Cheikha Rimitti, singer and songwriter, born May 8 1923; died May 15 2006