When we were in Budapest, we visited the Bartok museum on the "hill" (Buda-side). We saw countless transcriptions of fiddle tunes he had collected from Transylvania, carefully annotated and compiled. Many of them found their way into his works, I'm sure. There is a wonderful picture of him sitting in an ox-cart in Turkey with pencil and music paper getting a tune down. As far as I know, though, he didn't collect songs, just tunes.

Alan Lomax's collecting methods were interesting and to some controversial. Alan could be very forceful about what he wanted recorded and how. It seems, like Sharp and others, that he had a preconceived idea of what he was looking for. Sometimes, the problem is that the collector may miss something he/she is not looking for.

Frank