‘I was born twice,’ said the great Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin. ‘In Kazan I opened my eyes to life, and in Tbilisi to music.’ The city where he began his career in 1894 may have had a thriving operatic scene, but what made it one of the most musical cities on earth – and still does today – was its unique polyphony.

On my first visit to Tbilisi I went up to the fourth-century Narikala fortress, symbol of the nation’s independence, where I found a group of young men with tear-stained faces, clutching bottles of vodka and singing a slow choral lament. This was their way of mourning a friend who had just died in a car crash, and would I like to join them for a shot?

It being a Sunday, I then walked down to Sioni Cathedral, past magazine vendors selling classical sheet music. In the surrounding streets impromptu circles of middle-aged gents were singing folk songs in immaculate three-part counterpoint. Inside the cathedral, amid a blur of bells, candles, incense, and more tear-stained faces, three choirs – one male, one female, one mixed – were taking it in turns to ramp up religious fervour with a non-stop stream of the three-part harmony which the eleventh-century Georgian philosopher Ioane Petritsi had compared to the Holy Trinity.

This was in 1997, before capitalism had discovered Tbilisi, and when it was still effectively a Soviet city. In those days, every Georgian adult could join in complex three-part drinking songs with an accuracy which no amount of liquor could damage – the music was hard-wired into their DNA. And when I watched a children’s choir being taught a new song full of awkward jumps and dissonances, I sensed the truth of that: within an hour, without a score, they had not only mastered it, but had each learned all three parts. This was a society in which the distinction between amateur and professional singers scarcely existed. Although young Georgians now listen to the same pop music as millennials do everywhere else, you can still count on this polyphonic facility in all Georgians over fifty.

To ‘ballad’ someone in seventeenth-century London meant to libel them in a song: ballad-singers were often on the wrong side of the law. Singers in the employ of the rich, or serving their municipalities as ‘waits’, were well-paid and legally protected. But in 1597 ‘wandering minstrels’ with no licence to perform were officially condemned to be whipped till they bled, ‘burnt through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron’, and sent to a house of correction.

Yet the country was awash with printed songs. They were pasted up on walls in city streets and taverns, and were sold in every market and at every fair; trade was particularly brisk at public executions. These were the penny-dreadfuls of the day.

Printed in bold ‘blackletter’ type on one side of a folio, these song sheets were known as broadsides, and the diarist Samuel Pepys was an avid collector of them. So were those who saw in them a commercial opportunity; songbooks became a profitable business. Most were filled with popular tunes by contemporary composers, with John Playford’s English Dancing Master going through eighteen editions. As the leading authority on British folk music Steve Roud observes, it’s worth remembering that in seventeenth-century London, musical literacy among the poor was high: Mr Pepys’s servant boy and all Mrs Pepys’s maids were sight-readers and instrumentalists.

The first songbook with antiquarian ambitions was published by Thomas Percy in 1765 as the three-volume Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, but its genesis was accidental. Percy was a cleric who eventually became a bishop, but he was also a well-connected poet and man of letters. While visiting a friend he noticed a sheaf of papers ‘lying dirty on the floor, under a bureau in the parlour’, which maids were using as firelighters. This turned out to be a miscellany of old songs and poems, albeit damaged and incomplete. He took it home and knocked it into shape. Two similar collections had recently been published without exciting interest, but friends including Samuel Johnson encouraged Percy to publish his. The poet William Shenstone, another of those friends, urged him to include additional songs culled from libraries, but to rewrite anything he deemed inelegant; ‘mere historical merit’, said Shenstone, was ‘not a sufficient recommendation for inclusion’.

It had taken months of planning to corral five charismatic bards for a Christmas recording session in the snow-bound Kazakh city of Almaty, but things went well. Some tracks they wanted to re-record, others I wanted redone, but finally we were all satisfied, and toasted our communal triumph. Then the singers dispersed to their villages, to start their traditional New Year week of non-stop inebriated revelry.

I went for a walk in the snow, to mull things over. Back in my hotel room, I settled to listen again to the products of our labour, and turned on my machine …

Nothing! The digital tape, which two hours earlier had been full, was blank. I called my producer in London, who said I must have walked through a magnetic field, maybe under a power cable, which had wiped the tape. These were pre-mobile days, and by now the singers were God knows where. Lost beyond recall, as was their wonderful Kazakh music.

Throat-slitting moments like this will be familiar to all collectors of songs in the wild: such mishaps come with the territory, but it’s a territory which acts on its denizens like a drug, even on part-time bit-players like me. But there’s no uniformity in the compulsions which have driven the collectors in this book, in which ‘song’ can denote a style as well as a melody. The reasons for their chosen path reflect everything from simple patriotism to convoluted personal psychology, and quite often pure chance.

When the French Jesuit priest Joseph Amiot set sail for Beijing in 1751, he surely had little idea as to what he might do there, beyond learning enough Chinese to save some souls for Christ: the massive tome he compiled on Chinese classical music over the next forty years, which scholars still consult today, was an unplanned by-product. When the teenaged Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir was imprisoned in Constantinople as a political hostage in 1689, no one could have predicted that he would put down roots, fall in love with the arcane intricacies of Ottoman music, and become its chief exponent and chronicler.

Colonial curiosity, sometimes tinged with guilt, drove song collectors visiting the beleaguered Native Indian communities of nineteenth-century America, but most found their music bewildering.

It was Mily Balakirev who collected ‘The Song of the Volga Boatmen’ in Nizhny Novgorod in 1860; he was one of several Russian composers who went on collecting trips down that river, and further south to the Caucasus. They were impelled by the Slavophile romanticism that was then the fashion among Russian intellectuals, but with the exception of Musorgsky they all treated what they found as raw material for conventional salon music.

The folklorist on whose discoveries Stravinsky drew for the wedding songs in Les noces was the real thing. Pyotr Vasilyevich Kireyevsky (1808–1856) was Russia’s leading collector in the 1830s and 40s, and both Pushkin and Gogol sent him song texts they had come across. He faithfully reproduced what his informants sent, keeping local dialects and regional variants intact, and including descriptions of performance. The result, says historian Richard Taruskin, was ‘a panorama of wedding customs throughout the length and breadth of Russia that may appear indiscriminate and redundant, but that in fact provides an unprecedentedly rich assemblage of the artefacts of Russian bït, life-as-lived’. Kireyevsky began to publish his songs in the 1840s, then after an unexplained change of mind stopped completely; a selection of his songs was published in 1911, and that was Stravinsky’s source. Thousands more Kireyevsky songs still await publication today.

Spurred by an awareness that industrialisation and urbanisation were ringing the death knell for folk music, song collectors proliferated during the latter years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, most of them operating without the luxury of recording equipment. The Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben (1811–1870) published 2200 texts and 811 melodies of Bohemian folk song; Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) did the same for Moravian music.

Topping the league for sheer productivity was Vasil Stoin (1880–1938), a Bulgarian violinist-musicologist who with his assistants gathered – without recording technology – many thousands of folk songs from every part of Bulgaria between 1926 and 1937. His method was go out into the fields and vineyards, catch the music on the wing, and whistle what he had noted down, letting the singers verify its accuracy. His classifications, by metre, rhythm, scale, and function, were as scientific as those of Bartók, who drew on his work for his own purposes.

Song collecting took wing in eighteenth-century Europe under three impulses: political, colonial, and economic. ‘Through music our race was humanised; through music it will attain greater humanity,’ wrote the Prussian philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). When he coined the term Volkslied – ‘folk song’ – it was to exemplify the soul of a people; folk song would be the quintessential expression of Romantic nationalism, and its character would reflect the character of a nation. The concept didn’t operate in terms of rich or poor, educated versus peasantry; it embraced everyone. Herder argued that it was a patriotic duty to collect Volkslieder as devotedly as he himself did, before they disappeared.

The second impulse behind the new vogue was colonial curiosity: what did the music of the subjugated peoples – and the hoped-for Christian converts – actually sound like? The Swiss theologian Jean de Léry (1534–1611) wrote about the music of Brazil, using musical notation and describing antiphonal singing between men and women; Captain James Cook (1728–1779) described the music and dance of Pacific islanders. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (1768) was the first book to deal with the ‘diverse musical accents’ of other lands, giving samples of Swiss, Iranian, Chinese, and Canadian Amerindian music. The most graphic colonial account came from the Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1771–1806) on his journey along the Niger River. Repeatedly attacked by tribesmen, and several times imprisoned by their suspicious rulers, he was at one point taken in, fed, and lodged with great generosity by the women of a Malian village, who allowed him to watch as they spun cotton and sang through the night. ‘They lightened their labour by songs,’ he wrote,

European musical explorers had China in their sights three centuries before the era of recording; prominent among them were Jesuit priests. And the influence of their discoveries could be far-reaching: by introducing the sheng mouth organ to Europe in 1777, Father Joseph Amiot paved the way for the invention of the harmonica and the accordion. Chinese musicologists, who beat their European counterparts in the race to solve the mathematics of equal temperament, were in many ways ahead.

The Jesuit project was to win souls for Christ, but in China they realised they would only achieve that by going native. One of the first of these explorer-missionaries was an Italian named Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who wore the traditional silk robes of the Confucian literati and was one of the first Western scholars to speak and write Mandarin; his intellectual feats included translating Euclid into Chinese, and mapping the world in Chinese characters. It was this cultural immersion that earned him the honour of being, in 1601, the first European allowed to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing. The clavichord with which he charmed the reclusive emperor Wan Li was his hook to engage the monarch’s interest in both Western music and the religion of which that music was the expression.

Ricci was an omnivorous diarist, and although he didn’t make a formal study of Chinese music he did observe it, even if his reaction was lordly disdain. While living in Nanjing he witnessed a rehearsal for a Confucian ceremony in which priests played ‘elegant’ music, as opposed to its raucous ‘banquet’ counterpart. ‘The priests who composed the orchestra were vested in sumptuous garments,’ he noted,

It’s no surprise that le kampong javanais – the Javanese village – should have been the most popular colonial attraction at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. People were charmed by the grace of the dance and the magic of the music, which might have been designed to represent Caliban’s sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. The resident dancers at the Exposition became tabloid celebrities; Saint-Saëns declared that gamelan ‘dream music’ had hypnotic powers. Debussy, having attended performances at the kampong, would later extol the music as being ‘as natural as breathing: their conservatoire is the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind among the leaves, and the thousand sounds of nature.’

Yet the English were the first Europeans to appreciate it. One of Sir Francis Drake’s entries in the logbook of the Golden Hind in 1580 describes a musical exchange on the south coast of Java between the local ruler and his English visitors. First Drake gave a performance with his musicians in honour of Raia Donan, king of Java, then he listened to the king’s ‘country-musick, which though it were of a very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant and delightfull’. European interest was rekindled in the nineteenth century with the collecting expeditions of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and others, but the melodic and harmonic nature of gamelan only came properly into focus when the English physiologist Alexander Ellis subjected Javanese music to tonal analysis in his pioneering study of ‘the scales of various nations’.

Colonial links forged in the seventeenth century ensured that Dutch and Javanese scholars should lead the musicological enquiry. In 1857, students of the Royal Academy of Delft became the first Europeans to give a gamelan performance; the author of the programme note expressed an awareness of its microtonal modes, but gave a patronising explanation for them. Quarter tones, he wrote, were due to ‘a deficiency of the instruments’ because the Javanese had ‘no knowledge of the mechanics necessary to make them all the same … The variety of sounds and the simplicity of style cause all pieces to sound almost alike.’ But Dutch scholarship was soon on the trail in a properly

In 1911 a group of folklorists set out from St Petersburg to comb the Russian shtetls for Jewish songs and chants. Inspired by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and led by the playwright Shloyme Ansky – author of The Dybbuk – they wanted to record this oral tradition before it evaporated for good. The resulting collection of cylinders was so impressive that the incoming Bolsheviks decreed the work should continue, and they put their own man in charge. Moisei Beregovsky was a loyal Stalinist but an excellent folklorist, and until his deportation to Siberia in 1949 he recorded and meticulously transcribed several thousand more songs and texts. When he was released in 1955 the cylinders had disappeared, and it was generally assumed that his unique archive had been destroyed.

Forty-four years later Israel Adler, professor of musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, announced a discovery. The director of the National Library in Kiev had come to see him about photocopying manuscripts. ‘And seeing our cylinder collection, he mentioned that he too had some cylinders, which the American Library of Congress had looked at without much interest. Could this be the Beregovsky collection? I jumped on the first available plane to Kiev, and discovered that it was.’

Even leaving aside the awkward matter of past pogroms, the course of the ensuing affair was bumpy, with Kiev raising endless obstacles to the digitisation of the recordings Jerusalem wanted. While Adler’s aim was to make the archive available to scholars all over the world, Kiev’s aim was to make a profit. But as a Berlin-born Ost-Jude, Adler took this sort of thing for granted. ‘Whenever things seem discouraging, I listen again to these marvellous recordings,’ he told me. ‘Then I am re-inspired.’ To illustrate the point, he played some examples: a Bartókian country song with driving rhythms; a dance sounding as if it was straight out of Fiddler on the Roof; and an austerely beautiful liturgical chant. When the latter was broadcast on Haifa Radio, Adler said, a middle-aged Israeli rang in to say that he recognised the voice of the cantor: his own grandfather.

To those who have nothing, music comes like a gift from the gods. Like Gershwin’s Porgy, Domna Samiou grew up with plenty of nothing, and she too lived in a shack. Her parents were Greeks who had been expelled from Turkey in 1922, six years before she was born, and the shanty town on the outskirts of Athens where they lived with fellow-refugees, under the disapproving eye of the police, had neither water nor electricity. Music was Samiou’s passion, but there wasn’t much of it around – just a man carrying a gramophone with a flower horn, who would stop on his rounds and play a song for half a drachma; otherwise it was the singing in a nearby church where, every Sunday, she and her father would attend service. ‘Not out of religious zeal,’ she later explained, ‘but for the music. To me it was like going to a concert or the theatre, and I learned all the liturgies by heart.’ Being female, she was not allowed to sing inside the church, but she made up for it back home: ‘My sister, my mother, my father and I would all sit round the brazier, and my father and I would chant – he would be the priest and I would be the deacon, or he would be the left choir and I would be the right. In Easter week I was in my seventh heaven.’

She loved the all-night vigils which women would hold in their shacks, to pray for a sick child or absentee husband. ‘They would borrow an icon of the Virgin Mary from the church, and beside it they would place a tin of sand in which guests could put their candles. And they would tell us children to chant, saying that God would listen to us, because we were young and innocent.’

Life didn’t get easier as time went on. Her father died of malnutrition when she was twelve, and the rich lady in whose house she found employment as a cleaner took her in as a lodger, ‘so that I could eat a plate of food and not starve to death as well’. The German occupation was followed by civil war in the streets, during which the shanty town was burnt to the ground, leaving the remainder of the family homeless.

Instrumental revivals can crop up in unlikely places: the power-house behind the current taiko craze – mushrooming on every continent – is to be found on the ruggedly windswept island of Sado in the Sea of Japan. In medieval times, Sado was a place of exile to which shoguns consigned their political enemies, one of whom was the fourteenth-century dramatist Zeami Motokiyo, the father of Noh theatre. ‘When I go there,’ said the Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa, as he presented The Tempest as a Noh rehearsal on Sado, ‘I hear the voices of the dead.’

Sado is beautiful in summer, but in winter it’s a desolate place whose inhabitants scratch a meagre living from fishing and rice-growing. Since labouring in the paddy-fields holds no charms for the young, they now routinely migrate to the mainland cities. Yet young people of a different, somewhat masochistic stamp are queuing up to enrol for a two-year taiko drumming apprenticeship on Sado, and are ready to endure rigours reminiscent of a Siberian penal colony to do so.

Fancy starting your day at 6.00am with a six-kilometre run up and down a steep mountain path – no rests allowed, and no walking, in all weathers including snow? Thereafter your day will be rigidly timetabled, with relentless drilling on drums interspersed with intensive training in a wide range of performance arts, until you tumble into bed from exhaustion at 10.00pm. There’s no TV in your dormitory, and you’re not allowed to smoke, drink alcohol, or have sex. And how are your woodwork skills? You’ll need some, because you must fashion your own drumsticks from the hardwood block you’re given at the outset. And will you miss your mobile? There’s just one landline shared with everyone else which you’re allowed to use when you feel a bit lonesome and want to call home. Residents at Her Majesty’s prisons have it cushy in comparison.

Kodo is the name of the company which these apprentices – now increasingly female – hope to join after they graduate, but with a mandatory probationary year, followed by a further weeding-out, most don’t make the final cut. Although it’s by no means the only professional company focusing on taiko drumming, Kodo is the best-known internationally.

The flamboyant Paul Bowles is best known as author of the novel The Sheltering Sky – made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci – but he also had other talents. Born in 1910, he was musically gifted and his initial ambition was to be a poet; at twenty he was making his mark with the reigning literary deities, first in New York, then in Paris where he charmed the celebrated literary tyrant Gertrude Stein. She introduced him to Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound, and André Gide, but she didn’t rate his poetry: she thought he should stick to music, and propelled him and his mentor-lover the composer Aaron Copland towards Tangier, where a summer in the sun might, she hoped, feed his muse.

Copland hated Morocco, but for Bowles it was the coup de foudre. He would go on to have considerable success in New York as a composer of instrumental works, scores for ballets and films, and incidental music for theatre productions by Orson Welles; his sound experiments with words would be harnessed by William Burroughs for his novel The Naked Lunch. And he would go on other travels – he briefly owned and lived on an island in the Indian Ocean – but that initial taste of Tangier triggered a lifelong addiction.

The Sahara, he declared, was a place where the sky’s shelter was anything but comforting: ‘a great stretch of earth where climate reigns supreme, and every gesture man makes is in conscious defence from, or propitiation of, the climatic conditions. Man is hated in the Sahara … But where life is prohibited, it becomes a delectable forbidden fruit.’ In the 1930s he made several trips to Morocco and Algeria, collecting 78rpm discs of local music. At the suggestion of the composer Henry Cowell he made copies of these and sent them to Béla Bartók, who worked some Berber material into a piece. ‘When I heard the Concerto for Orchestra,’ Bowles wrote later, ‘there was the music, considerably transformed, but still recognisable to me, who was familiar with each note of every piece I had copied for him.’ In 1947 he settled permanently in Tangier, and spent the remaining fifty-two years of his life writing, composing, and giving interviews to literary pilgrims at his house in the Medina.

What is ‘Central Asia’? Denoting neither a language nor a nationality, the concept is a European one, devised to package a vast and multifarious region which disappeared from the political map during the Communist period. For the purposes of this chapter it comprises the republics which the Soviets carved out in the 1920s, and which are now known as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, plus Uyghur Xinjiang. For most of the twentieth century the region was resistant to outsiders: only now is the international spotlight moving back onto it, thanks partly to its new geo-political importance, and partly to a new awareness of its traditional culture, and in particular its music.

In Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan the traditional music is nomadic, reflecting the cycle of the seasons and the fauna of the steppes, with the same few instruments creating a musical lingua franca linking players thousands of miles apart. We’re talking principally about the jew’s harp, many kinds of lute, and the shamanic fiddle: with a mirror set in its bowl to ward off evil spirits, plus its haunting cello-like timbre, the last of these is a commanding presence. The two-string Kazakh dombra and the three-string Kyrgyz komuz are Central Asia’s answers to the guitar, their airy magic impregnated with the sound of horses’ hooves. To play at speed while waving your instrument balletically in the air – or behind your back, or upside down – is a routine mark of virtuosity.

These instruments can also have serious artistic purposes. What the Kazakhs call a kui and the Kyrgyz a küü is a wordless instrumental piece which may tell a story – perhaps about the winged horse Tulpar, cousin to the ancient Greeks’ Pegasus – or it may simply be a tone-poem. But the glory of this nomad-pastoralist music lies in its self-accompanied singing by bards; this is folk music of the most sophisticated sort.

It’s essentially a solo art, whose sound-world is permeated by Turkic and Mongolian influences. Urban influences from Iran, meanwhile, gave rise to the classical style of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which is rooted in a tradition of music theory that goes back to tenth-century Baghdad.

The birth of mechanical song collecting is often symbolised by the photograph of Béla Bartók recording in the Slovak village of Dražovce. That was in 1907, eleven years after his compatriot Béla Vikár had begun recording bagpipers in the field, but the image still has archetypal force. Under Bartók’s supervision, a woman sings into the horn of a phonograph. Standing to attention is a line of other women, young girls, and middle-aged men – all in their Sunday best, awaiting their turn to sing. The importance of this communal moment is reflected in their unsmilingly serious faces: a new kind of history is being made.

None of those present left an account of the experience, but a girl named Susana Cirt described a similar one ten years later, as Bartók and his friend the Italian conductor Egisto Tango came to record in the Romanian village of Torjas:

In the same year, seventeen-year-old Róza Ökrös, who was to become one of Bartók’s most celebrated singers, was accosted by him while working in the fields, and asked if she would sing. ‘In the evening he came to our quarters and sat down on a worker’s case, with a night-light beside him,’ she recalled sixty years later.

György Ligeti’s eightieth-birthday bash at the Barbican was characteristically provocative. The stage was shared in turn – and on strictly equal terms – by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing Ligeti’s ferociously complex Etudes, and by some singer-drummer Pygmies brought in from the rainforests of the Congo. No allowances were made for the latter: it became immediately clear that, despite their dramatically differing provenance, these musics were, in terms of melodic and rhythmic sophistication, on a par; the segues between them seemed so unforced that they might have been designed to go together.

The founder of this feast was a French-Israeli ethnomusicologist named Simha Arom, for whom the concert marked the culmination of a forty-year crusade. That had begun when, as a visiting horn player hired to create a brass band in the Central African Republic, he had looked out of his hotel window in Bangui and heard some Pygmy musicians in the garden below. ‘It was a shock,’ he told me in 2003. ‘It was a polyphony which made my spine tingle. How could these people play such complex music without a conductor? For me, that was as deep a musical experience as first hearing the music of Bartók. I sensed that this music existed in us all, like some Jungian archetype.’

He got to know the musicians, learned their language, and began to analyse how they made their music. ‘I noticed that they knew instantly when a wrong note was played. That meant they had rules. And if you have rules, you have a theory. But their theory was implicit – they didn’t know they had one, because they couldn’t express it in words. I made it my job to discover that theory, to establish the grammar of their music.’ To notate it, he first recorded the full ensemble, then played the tape through headphones to each musician in turn, getting them to perform their particular part for him to record. Meanwhile Ligeti had come to adore this intricately layered music thanks to some recordings he’d heard by the British anthropologist Colin Turnbull. Under its influence Ligeti had written similarly constructed pieces for Aimard to play, and the Barbican concert was the hall’s birthday present to him.

The titans of song collecting were a charismatic Texan double-act: John A. Lomax (1867–1948) and his son Alan (1915–2002). John grew up among what he called ‘the upper crust of the po’ white trash’, and a burning sense of mission led him to become Twenties America’s most influential folklorist; his musical discoveries among cowboys and black convict singers spanned the end of oral transmission and the dawn of recording. Alan Lomax became his father’s co-recordist at seventeen; after John’s death, he carried on the torch in the Mississippi Delta, before extending his activities worldwide.

John brought celebrated singers including Lead Belly into the limelight; the classic songs he collected and anthologised helped redefine American culture. Alan Lomax’s effect on that culture was seismic, as he made his own discoveries, and as a singer-collector-impresario led folk-blues revivals in both America and Britain. His books, plays, and radio programmes championed the music of the dispossessed; he played a leading part in the musical revolution which threw up Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. Meanwhile with his researches in Haiti, Spain, and Italy he opened up new fields in musicology. And drawing on his archive of films, videotapes, and sound recordings he promoted ‘Cantometrics’, a system of song-classification which he himself had created, and which he messianically believed could unify – musically at least – the world.

This was what six-year-old John Lomax chanted as he ran barefoot through freshly turned furrows, doling out seed-corn from his bucket. His autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, depicts a rural Texan childhood in which folk songs, revivalist hymns, and the recitation of English poetry were all part of daily life. His best friend was a young ex-slave whom he taught to read, and who taught him plantation songs and dance steps in return. Lomax didn’t grow up a cowboy because his father didn’t have enough livestock, but cowboy culture was all around him, and cowboy songs got into his soul. His father had bred him up to be a farmer, but he was determined to study, and sold his beloved pony to finance himself.