Outsiders are fascinated by griots for reasons that are self-evident: Here is a hereditary group of specialists who seem to incarnate the social functions of language itself.
Almost any remark made about the power of speech to communicate, distort, unify, control, entertain, enlighten, inspire, educate, and deceive might also be applied to griots.
Moreover, a mythos now attaches to griots, who have come to symbolize all that is positive about the preservation of the past in African oral tradition. The concept has been uprooted from its native soil, transplanted, and grafted onto other notions (Celtic bards, Siberian shamans, Romantic artists) to satisfy a real cultural need-certainly in America the image of Uncle Remus as the master-storyteller (despite the venerable tradition of his lore) has hardly proved viable in the modern world.

Naturally, much of this myth-making involves appropriation and adaptation of the original institution. Many of the features that define a griot in the original West African context are lost in translation: questions of hereditary and ambiguous social status, the association of griots with other craftoriented figures such as the smith or the leather-worker, questions of behavioral norms, the relations of griots and power structures. These elements are lost not only because transposition from one social system to another is awkward at best, but also because they attach to a less idealized vision of the griot, one in which the griot is a subordinate, dependent upon formerly wealthy nobles for subsistence and wealth and excluded from significant political power.

Yet these features should also draw our attention, for in West Africa they are common to the institution across ethnohistorical lines and mark it among several neighboring groups: the Soninke, the Mande peoples, the Fulbe, and the Wolof. The inference that the institution owes much to interethnic borrowing is inescapable; an interesting question is when and how the transference occurred.

Is it a legacy of the tradition of empire? Might it have grown up during the times of the Atlantic slave trade? These features also distinguish this regional category of praise-singers from those of other groups such as the Yoruba, the Fon, and the old kingdom of Rwanda, where the institution of royal bards (praise-singers or linguists, as they are sometimes called) developed without some of the associations found in the Mande world (praise-singers in general, without royal patronage, are found all across Africa).

Current constructions also stand in opposition to an older view of griots developed largely in the works of European travelers, who found griots to be parasitic, venal, and persistent in their attempts at exactions. The modern school is, first of all, sympathetic to the oral tradition which griots in some way represent and also to the underclasses of society.

The model for social exploration leading to descriptive analysis is that of participant observation. So we question the assertions made by the nobles of the society about the greed of griots, and we endeavour to understand the values that move all sides in the social transactions involved in praise-singing. The popularity of the theme is such that we have at hand four recent books based on extensive fieldwork among griots in the Mande world (where they are known as jeli or jali), in Mali and the Gambia, as additions to the extant library. We also have an ever-increasing number of texts representing performances from the rich Mande oral tradition. Not all are by jelilu; hunters' songs are also gaining presence in the corpus.