The first major champion of Native Indian music – and the first American fieldworker in the ethnomusicological sense of the word – was Alice C. Fletcher, a self-taught anthropologist whose initial trip into Omaha territory fired her to such a degree that she devoted the rest of her life to pro-Indian activism. She had met the Omaha singer Francis La Flesche at a Boston literary society in 1879, and he became her lifelong informant and collaborator. But as she made clear in her book A Study of Omaha Indian Music, which she published in 1893, the path of true love did not initially run smooth. At the first few festivals she attended she registered nothing beyond ‘a screaming downward movement that was gashed and torn by a vehemently beaten drum’. The sound was distressing, she said, until she realised that everyone else was enjoying themselves, and that the distress was simply her own. She began to listen more intently, and to note down what she heard, but the process was ‘crude and full of difficulties, difficulties that I afterward learned were bred of preconceived ideas … generally accepted theories concerning “savage” music. The tones, the scales, the rhythms, the melodies that I heard, which after months of work stood out more and more clearly as indisputable facts, lay athwart these theories and could not be made to coincide with them.’ For a long while she was tempted, she said, more to distrust her ears than her theories.

But then she was taken ill, and for months lay at death’s door.