Djigui Traoré was born in 1940 in Sirakelen, around Koutiala, a town in the Sikasso district, one of Mali's fertile farming regions.

He comes from the Minianka ethnic group, which straddles Burkina Faso and Mali, a farming people of great repute with a rich musical heritage.
Outside of simples pleasures, Minianka music is subordinate to the calendar of agrarian ritual, its initiations and funerals.
So it was that Djigui Traoré was born under the sign of music : his father played the great drum and his adopted father the smaller underarm drum to which he introduced the boy as soon as he could beat out a rythm. But Djigui quickly became interested in other instruments, firstly the balafon and then the m'bolon. The m'bolon is a three stringed rythmic instrument from the donso n'goni (hunters' harp) and kamele n'goni (played by young people) families.