In the late 90's my grandfather passed away and I inherited his worldly belongings. Life has a way of tying you down and I didn’t have time to go through it all so I stored it in a vault.
More recently, I found myself looking for an outlet so I went to the storage vault and started organizing and sorting through everything he had left me. Of all the old antiques and neat tidbits the most astounding was a crate containing several dusty old gramophone records.
That's where the story of the Artist of Unknown Origin begins.
Being somewhat of an audiophile myself, I had the technology to play these relics, so I started listening. It sounded like an aboriginal person singing in a language I had never heard and playing, if playing it could be called, the guitar in what could only be described as a most hideous fashion.
As I dug further I found several booklets with the English translation of this antiquated language, and thus learned what he was singing about. It also gave scant details about the artist’s background.
He came from a place where his people had no exposure to music at all, their concept of music was loose vocalization over top of insects buzzing. Somehow he was given a guitar, or perhaps a guitar fell from the sky like the coke bottle in the Gods Must be Crazy, either way he was not shown what it was or how to play it.
It is apparent from these recordings that he played the guitar in whatever way he saw fit - sometimes slapping it, even smacking it on the ground. Tuning was an unknown concept to him, in fact some songs would simply be him changing the tuning of the strings.
According to one of the booklets I found, my grandfather’s friend was an early experimenter in audio, an audiophile much like myself, and had spent his time traveling the world capturing sounds. At some point in his travels he must have encountered the Artist of Unknown Origin and was so intrigued he decided to lay the sounds to wax.
My recent focus has been to try and match the lyrics to the audio recordings to provide a translation that would match. Some of these I am certain that the translation matches the recording as they were carefully annotated. Others were less clear and thus I couldn’t be certain if the translation matched the recording. I’ve also invested a lot of effort in transferring these audio files to digital format and cleaning them up using all the modern goodies that we have at our finger tips. Unfortunately, the quality of some has degraded significantly such that scrubbing them is difficult.
In closing, to this day, I still find it fascinating that someone who had absolutely no concept of music was able to figure it out, on their own, and create what we today would call folk type music...albeit somewhat archaic. His song writing was, on occasion, overly poignant and more often hilarious.
