Hugh Tracey

Hugh Travers Tracey was an English ethnomusicologist. He and his wife collected and archived music from Southern and Central Africa. From the 1920s through the 1970s, Tracey made over 35,000 recordings of African folk music. He popularized the mbira (a musical instrument of the Shona people) internationally under the name kalimba.

Hugh Tracy saw the importance of music within culture when he worked a tobacco farm in Southern Rhodesia. Here, he experienced music that displayed beliefs and morals, which inspired him to make his field recordings. He wanted to stop the loss of traditional music and culture from modernity and recorded all of his field recordings from rural areas that still held onto traditional culture and ideas.