Hugh Tracey's Historical Recordings of Central, East, and South African Music

Two Bandcamp albums that compile some of the many songs Tracey collected in Africa.

I briefly touched on the topic of Hugh Tracey a little while back. To summarize, he traveled throughout Africa for much of his life, collecting songs. Here's an overview of his activities.

If you head to Bandcamp, you can find a few collections of Tracey's...collections. There might be more, but these are the ones I'm aware of.

Listen All Around: The Golden Age of Central and East African Music bills itself as:

47 newly-transferred and remastered recordings made by ethnomusicologist and field-recording pioneer Hugh Tracey in central and eastern Africa between 1950-58. The genre and focus of this collection is rumba and its variations -- Congolese rumba, dansi and benga.

It's from the Dust-to-Digital label and was released in 2018. Six of the songs are available for preview.

And there's Beating Heart - South Africa (Originals) Recorded by Hugh Tracey. It was released in 2017. Here's the lowdown:

Here are the incredible original field recordings made by High Tracey in 1950s South Africa. Hugh's passion was for the world to hear the music of Africa and over a 50 year period he devoted his life to this mission, over 35,000 recordings across 18 countries.

With kind permission from the International Library of African Music, Beating Heart sent a selection of these songs to artists to sample and remix for the 'Beating Heart - South Africa' album. Proceeds support gender equality in South Africa through the Women’s Legal Centre, as well as helping to teach music production skills to kids at Grahamstown’s Access Music Project.