Youssou N'Dour's mother, of Tukulor descent within Dakar's Wolof griot caste, carried her family's oral-history and praise-singing inheritance into the home rather than onto any stage of her own — biographers describe her bringing her young son along to sing at neighborhood religious ceremonies, the informal classroom where he says he actually learned the griot's trade. No recording of her singing exists; her legacy lives on in the son who calls himself, only half-jokingly, a "modern griot."