Hugh Tracey

South African ethnomusicologist Hush Tracey was born to British parents in 1903. As a young man, while farming in what is today Zimbabwe, Tracey fell in love with the songs sung by his African co-workers. In 1929, astonished that nobody was documenting these and other indigenous African musics, Tracey set about making high quality recordings and keeping meticulous notes about the music. A couple of years later, with the support of a Carnegie Scholarship, Tracey branched out into radio broadcasting and wholeheartedly devoted himself to recording the traditional musics of sub-Sa...