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Oral tradition has been finding its way into written form since there has been writing. Aesop’s fables, while oral and vernacular in character, cannot be distinguished from their written form because it is through writing that they have been passed down to us. In this age of high-resolution documentation, almost everything is recorded in some form. Even tradition bearers who have had little discourse with or use for the printed word are becoming increasingly adept in a world of digital manipulation. We ought to adjust our concepts of “oral” and “written” to reflect these changes, since what will survive of oral culture today will almost certainly be known through recordings, archives, and the web in all its many forms. The question of the transition of oral culture to an inscribed form resonates for me as I have been assisting in the production of a musical recording of Mandinka praise singing by one of New York City’s most accomplished hereditary singers, from Mali, West Africa. This formerly oral tradition has been practiced in New York since the early 1980s, when immigrants from Senegal, Gambia, Mali, and Guinea began to settle here. Theirs is an increasingly transnational culture, due in no small part to digital media. I first met Bronx-based singer and musician Abdoulaye Diabate in 1996, when he was crossing some of Africa’s most traditional musical practices with its contemporary popular music. Descended since the thirteenth century from a family of hereditary musicians, court entertainers, and counselors, known as jalilu (the singular form is jali), he came to the United States playing electric guitar behind popular singers from the Ivory Coast. Over the dozen years he has been in New York, he has collaborated with musicians and composers in the genres of jazz, Afro-pop, and contemporary and experimental music. Between concert engagements, however, many weekends find him and his counterparts at Malian and Guinean community ceremonies wherever African communities are found, from Atlanta and Florida in the South, to Chicago and Minneapolis in the Midwest, to, of course, New York. Patrons of such events are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to bring a jali—or even better, a group of them—to preside over an event. At weddings and naming ceremonies, Diabate does what his ancestors have been doing for eight centuries: singing blessing songs of the West African Islamic tradition, praise songs to patrons, and songs of advice and counsel to brides, grooms, families, and youth. Two of the most prevalent themes of advice songs are respect for elders and the importance of saving face. A common refrain runs that the deeds you do will live on in the words or gossip—part of the oral tradition—of your community. Back in a Brooklyn studio, Diabate has had the opportunity to record anything he wants. This is his signature project to date, featuring his choice of repertoire, instrumentation, and musicians. This is the recording he hopes will define his sound and legacy, both here in New York and back home in Mali, where he wants the recording to be available so that family, friends, and the rest of the musical community can know what he is up to: “writing” down—in a digitally recorded and edited fashion—the essence of the oral tradition from which he came. “Je suis un griot, et je dois faire de tradition. Mes parents ont faites la tradition, et c’est ce que je dois faire pour la memoir d’eaux,” he says—“I am a griot and must maintain the tradition. My parents did this, and this what I must do for their memory.” The recording’s range of songs gives a good sense of where the heart of this musical tradition is found today. In the past, a griot or jali might devote a larger part of his repertoire and practice to singing epics of the formative history of the Mali empire or reciting genealogies of a tightly knit community at weddings and other ceremonies, where it matters who is related to whom. Now, removed far from its source, the essential elements of the repertoire are songs of more general appeal and pertinence to modern life. “Denin” tells children not to cry, for their parents will take care of them—a kind of African “Summertime.” Another song, “Kuma,” counsels the listener not to gossip about people, as it is contrary to a proper and holy life. “Dieu n’aime pas ça” he says—“God does not like this.” This song invokes the words of a modern Islamic religious leader, Sherif Ousmane Madany Haidara of Bamako, Mali. Diabate very much wants his music to be heard by this very man and his community, to show them that, even in New York, these wise words resonate. Other songs reflect the timeless tradition of praise for patrons. One tells of a Bronx African grocery store owner, who also owns a ferry boat on the Gambia River in Africa, and who is remarkably generous to people in the Mandinka community on both sides of the Atlantic. All of this is being related through digital multitrack recording and editing, all intended to recreate the spontaneous interplay of African harp, marimba, guitar (replacing the traditional lute), percussion, and call-andresponse voices. The notion of continuity through collective memory is being enhanced through the recording, but the recording is not merely an ethnographic tool. Indeed, this project shows how the tradition bearer has adopted the tool of preservation and incorporated it into the tradition itself. I look forward to exploring this use of technology in tradition through Voices and any other means we folklorists of New York State can muster.

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