‘Aiṭa jebliya, a popular genre of sung poetry indigenous to the Arabic-speaking Jebala region in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco, has perennially held a peripheral status in the music culture of the Kingdom—stemming from decades of European Protectorate rule and the resurgent postcolonial hegemony of Moroccan elites. How do the musicians performing this genre confront its marginalization by embodying the aesthetic of their distinctive music and poetry, hence asserting identity and pride in Jebli culture and overturning lingering presumptions of the “backwardness” of the region (cf. Vignet-Zunz 2014)? My presentation, based on direct observation and interviews conducted during my fieldwork in 2022-2023, addresses this question by examining the performance practice of Lahcen Laaroussi Tanjaoui, a prominent local vocalist whose command of the repertoire and technical mastery have earned him an unofficial attribution of Sawtu Jebli (“his voice is of the mountains”). Interlocutors in the Jebala region particularly point to the quality of beḥḥa (hoarseness), which makes his voice “ḥərsh (rough) but ḥəluw (sweet) at the same time.” I explore what this paradox signifies for his listeners as a marker of local identity, and discern the ways in which his voice evokes—and valorizes—a rural Jebli ethos perceived as “authentic” by audiences in varied performance contexts. My ethnographic research in the seldom-studied Jebala region complements recent scholarship on ‘ayyu’, an improvised poetic form and sub-genre of ‘aiṭa jebliya (cf. Curtis 2015 and Gintsburg 2018), and interrogates the class-related cultural hierarchies and abiding Western encroachment which corroborate the “antagonistic forces at play within Moroccan popular culture” (Sabry 2005). By focusing on the agency of the culture-bearer in mobilizing identity and pride within a marginalized region, my project invites parallel inquiries from those in other formerly colonized cultures throughout the Global South who seek to reclaim their indigenous voices.