The oldest singer in the valley is ninety-one and sings only in the afternoons now, when her voice has warmed. She holds in her memory some two hundred ballads that exist nowhere else — no score, no recording, no printed word — and when she is gone, unless someone is listening, they will be gone too.

A small team has spent three years listening. They arrive with recorders and patience, and they have learned that the songs come loose only slowly, over many visits, between cups of coffee and long silences. You cannot ask a ballad to perform on demand. You wait for it.

What has surprised them is how much painting the songs carry with them. Each of the old singers travelled, in their youth, with a painted banner — a cloth unrolled at the fair to show the story the ballad told, scene by scene, so that those who could not follow the words could follow the pictures.

Most of the banners are gone, burned or rotted or thrown out as junk. The team is racing to record the few that survive alongside the voices that go with them, because the two were never meant to be parted — the song explained the painting, and the painting held the song in place.

The archive they are building will outlast the singers, which is the whole sad point of it. But sit in the room while the ninety-one-year-old sings, one afternoon, her banner unrolled beside her, and you understand what the recording can never quite hold: that this was never a museum piece. It was, until this moment, simply alive.