Aïta ('cry' or 'call' in Darija) is the traditional rural vocal music of Morocco, historically led by female singer collectives called cheikhat (singular: cheikha). Ensembles feature three to six women singers plus male instrumentalists (viola, oud, sometimes keyboard) and tar (frame drum). The singers sit in a circle, the lead delivers a short phrase, and the rest respond — the call-and-response is the form's core. Regional styles diverge: Aita Hasbaouia (Safi region) uses 4/4; Aita Marsaouia (the Zaer region) uses 6/8; Aita Chamaria (northern Zaër and Haouz) uses irregular meters; and the climactic kayda section shifts into accelerating variable meter. Lyrics in Darija cover farm work, love, heartbreak, social satire, political protest, and — remarkably — explicit sexual metaphor. If melhoun is the urban male tradition, aita is its rural female counterpart.

The cheikhat have historically occupied a doubled position in Moroccan society: economically independent women earning a living from performance, and socially stigmatised as 'not respectable.' During the French protectorate (1912–56), colonial audiences exoticised them as 'Moorish geishas,' while rural Moroccans understood them as authentic bearers of collective memory. The twentieth-century emblem was Cheikha Haja El Hamdaouia (c.1930–2021, near Casablanca), who moved aita's lyrics and gestures into urban salons and onto records, setting the precedent for a rural woman singer becoming a national star. Contemporaneously, Fatna Bent El Hocine (c.1930–2015, from Ben Guerir) became the definitive Aita Marsaouia singer, and her 1980s recordings are still the reference archive for the tradition. She never married and trained thirteen apprentices to carry her art.

Follow the call-and-response first: the cheikha shouts a phrase and the ensemble either repeats it or gives a matching response. As the piece develops the lead's phrases get shorter and the response longer, until only one repeated cry remains — that is the kayda climax. Then hear the viola (kamanja): the same instrument as in melhoun but here it fills gaps between vocal lines rather than taking solos. The tar drum works in two struck-tone modes — palm-strike for low, fingertip for high — functioning almost like a hip-hop kick/snare pair. Fatna Bent El Hocine's 'Kaftanek Mahloul' is textbook rural-wedding aita, accelerating three times over five minutes. Hamdaouia's urbanised aita — electric keyboard and drum machine added — is the transitional form on the way to chaabi.

Enter through Fatna Bent El Hocine's 'Kaftanek Mahloul' (1980s recording) — traditional aita in its purest form. Then her 'Daba Yiji' for the accelerating kayda structure. Hajja Hamdaouia's 'Mahmouma' (1976, already in the database under moroccan-chaabi) shows urbanised aita at its landmark moment. For contemporary continuation, the soundtrack to the 2022 Moroccan film Aïta covers how the new generation carries on the style. Recordings are often old and lo-fi, which is part of the point — the humidity of a rural wedding night is embedded in the noise. Outside, or late at night with the volume up, is closer to how the music actually works.

'Aita' means 'call' or 'summons' — the very name encodes the ritual structure of demanding a response from the audience. That structure aligns aita functionally with West African griots, African-American gospel, and Japanese folk song leaders. Fatna Bent El Hocine trained by singing six to eight hours a night at rural festivals in her youth; her vocal cords stayed intact into old age, and she could still sustain a full hour of continuous singing in her eighties. Hajja Hamdaouia died in October 2021 at 91 and received a Moroccan state funeral — an unprecedented honour for a cheikha. Her lifelong statement 'Aita is my mother' declared her loyalty to the rural women's tradition. A wave of films, plays, and documentaries about aita in the 2010s and 2020s has re-centred the cheikhat as historically significant artists.