For ethnomusicologists, song collecting per se is not usually the primary goal. But some combine scientific rigour with a collector’s love for music in a way which neither Percy Grainger nor Béla Bartók could have faulted. So let one example of this breed stand for many: John Blacking’s Venda Children’s Songs, published in 1967, is still a classic of the academic genre.

Best known for his definition of music as ‘humanly organised sound’, and for his influential book How Musical Is Man?, Blacking initially aspired to be a concert pianist. But he began his career with service in the Coldstream Guards, leading a platoon of Malay irregulars in the campaign against Communist insurgents in 1948–9. He read anthropology at Cambridge, went back to work in Malaya as a government advisor on the place of ‘Aborigines’, got sacked because he disagreed with the official policy of removing them from the rainforest, and went instead to work for Hugh Tracey, who was at that time compiling the International Library of African Music in Johannesburg. Accompanying Tracey on recording trips to Mozambique and Zululand, he developed his own theory about the role of body-movement in the making of music.

In 1956 Blacking embarked on twenty-two months’ fieldwork with the Venda of the Sibasa District in Northern Transvaal. Singing Venda songs and playing their instruments, he pioneered the participant-observer method that was then becoming fashionable. As his obituarist John Baily points out, he tended to idealise the egalitarian aspect of Venda society, ignoring their division into noble and commoner classes, but his romantic characterisation of the Venda as ‘the musical people’, whom we should all emulate, gained traction worldwide. His ideas chimed with those underpinning the new Society for Ethnomusicology which had been established in the USA in 1955, but with one exception: he took issue with their analytical separation of music from its cultural context. Blacking was worried – and with hindsight, how right he was to worry – that ethnomusicology could reduce music to a mere sociological exercise. He saw music and its cultural context as inextricably interrelated, and this was his approach with the Venda; he christened it ‘cultural analysis’. In his trim and soldierly way, he taught generations of students at the Queen’s University of Belfast, who in turn carried his method round the world.