Music Of Africa Series No. 5. The Guitars Of Africa
The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, photographed for Common, curated by Khanya Mashabela, 6 May – 26 July 2023. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Title
Music Of Africa Series No. 5. The Guitars Of Africa
Date
1954
Authors
Various
Type
Vinyl record
Hugh Travers Tracey (born in Willand, England, 1903 and died in Krugersdorp, South Africa, 1977) was a farmer in Devon who migrated to Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) in the late 1920s to work on tobacco farms.
He began recording local folk music with the intention of sharing it with the world and maintaining these traditions in the archive. In 1934, he left farming to join the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) as an ethnomusicologist, travelling throughout Africa to record different forms of folk music around the continent. In 1954, Tracey founded the International Library of African Music (ILAM).
