If this book has an underlying theme, it’s the need to catch music before it disappears: this is what drives all song collectors. Two centuries ago the German collector Ludolf Parisius wrote: ‘Whoever wants to collect from the mouth of the people should hurry; folk songs are disappearing one after another.’ Writing in 1940, Béla Bartók ringingly declared: ‘One day all folk music will have been swept away.’ Meanwhile Percy Grainger was pointing to the force which many people today regard as the destroyer of indigenous music: ‘We see on all hands the victorious on-march of our ruthless Western civilisation, and the distressing spectacle of the gentle but complex native arts, wilting before its irresistible simplicity.’ Soon, he said, folk music in Europe would be dead.

These predictions were in some senses wrong – folk music still thrives in many forms – but in other senses they were also right. They were right about the consequences of Westernisation, industrialisation, and urbanisation; they were right about the musical losses following the death of villages.

Look at the songs which Alan Lomax collected in the Fifties in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Bahamas. A great many of them had evolved as integral facets of manual work: the Bahaman sponge fishermen’s polyphonic spirituals, the salt-miners’ songs in Sicily, the stone-cutters’ songs in Liguria; threshing and harvest songs, songs to accompany the making of shoes, or pots and pans for the kitchen. Consider the shirt-making and glove-sewing songs which Cecil Sharp collected in Somerset, or the sea shanties he collected on a quay beside the Bristol Channel. Consider the song which the ploughmen sang, and Komitas transcribed, while mounted on their twelve-ox leviathan in the Armenian province of Lori. Many of these songs had a structure reflecting the ritualised movements of the work they accompanied: they had no existence independently of the trade of which they formed an integral part.

All this work is now done by machines. Take away the physical activity, and you take away the meaning of the song, its purpose, its force; you neuter it. Very few of the peasant songs which Alan Lomax collected in Europe sixty years ago are sung today, except as folklore lovingly preserved in aspic. They’re gone, because the reasons for their existence are gone.