My father, Baba Kienou, is chief of the praise-singers of Burkina Faso. The guitar is new, but all the other instruments are traditional among praise-singers. The tama and the ngoni are for song, for listening. The kora makes people dance. The kora, the balafon and the djemb came into use later.
Today there are a lot of changes in the lives of praise-singers.
Though we still have chiefs and kings, they are not as they used to be, so we don't have praise-singing in the old way. My father stopped most of his work, not because he had forgotten the praises he should sing, but because his clients had died. He stopped in 1987. He's old now. If someone dies you praise the corpse.