It was the Zuni and the Hopi, the Sioux and the Passamaquoddy, who first prompted field recording in America. In the mid-nineteenth century, the emergent science of anthropology found its home-grown focus in the indigenous tribes which had been decimated by disease, robbed of their land, and targeted for obliteration through everything from forcible ‘civilisation’ to outright genocide. The grisly climax of the undeclared war which had raged for decades between the USA and its Indian communities was the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 where 150 men, women, and children of the Lakota tribe were butchered by whites who were fearful of the shamanic – yet essentially pacific – Ghost Dance movement. Thereafter, with most of the tribes confined to reservations, it was generally assumed that Darwinian evolution would ensure their culture’s demise.

Enlightened whites, including some of the soldiers who had been waging war on them, did what they could to ameliorate the Native Americans’ lot; they were driven by a combination of guilt and curiosity to celebrate Indian culture, and Indian music in particular. But that celebration was uphill work, given that many shared the views of a prominent ‘authority’ on American-Indian culture named Richard Irving Dodge. For him ‘the singing of the Indian consists in the monotonous repetition of a few half-guttural, half-nasal sounds (notes they can scarcely be called, as they form no music), varied by an occasional yell.’

This was the spur for the pioneering work of Alice C. Fletcher …