Foday Musa Suso was born in December 1950 in Wuli, a small village in eastern Gambia. Growing up in a family of traditional Mandinka griots, the musicians and storytellers who hold West African oral history, he started learning the 21-string kora at age seven. In 1977, he moved to Chicago and started the Mandingo Griot Society, blending old-world African harp melodies with American jazz, rock, and funk. That move kicked off decades of cross-genre work with heavyweights like Herbie Hancock, Philip Glass, Paul Simon, and the Kronos Quartet, putting the kora on the map for modern audiences around the world.