By the 1950's, Hugh Tracey recognized a dire situation: western culture and American music were spreading throught the world and were even making inroads into indigenous populations and music. He realized it was time to make a widespread survey of African music. So in 1952, he undertook the most extensive recording tours in Africa to date, spending most of the year in the field. He would repeat this in 1957. Private funding he had obtained enabled him to travel with three helpers (the recording engineer, his assistant and a driver) and two motor vehicles, state-of-the-art recording equipment, an electrical generator, and a half mile extension cord. Hugh was interested in all kinds of African music, but his favorite was kalimba music. As Paul Tracey related to me, his father Hugh would drive down the road and watch for telephone poles that were leaning over. These poles were missing their metal guy wires, which had been cut and used to make kalimba tines. He would then start asking around for musicians, and when he found them, the fun began.

Hugh was especially interested in the different scales that were used on the kalimbas, and he sought to understand how the kalimba spread through Africa and how it evolved, based on the present distribution of tunings he found throughout Africa. So, he would document the scales he found, comparing the kalimba tunings to a set of micro-tonal tuning forks, which are tuning forks with a much finer spacing between adjacent tones than the western chromatic scale. Then he would set up the generator out of hearing range of the village and play for the villagers some music he had recently recorded from a nearby region. Goading them on with their neighbors' music, he often inspired excellent performances, and the outdoor recording sessions usually went late into the night.

In 1954, Hugh Tracey founded the International Library of African Music (ILAM) to house his collection of recordings and documentary notes. In an attempt to defray the costs of travelling and recording, ILAM entered into an arrangement with record companies which began distributing "popular" recordings of African music to various parts of Africa. Meanwhile, ILAM made another product available to music researchers and ethno-musicologists: a complete set of recordings and notes from his survey of indigenous African music. The momentum of this enterprise led Hugh to make another grand recording tour in 1957. However, ILAM was not destined to be a self-supporting library.