The musical traditions of the Sudan were preserved by oud, shetern, and pennywhistle player, vocalist and folklorist Abdel Karim el-Kabli (sometimes spelled "Kably"). Gifted with a finely pitched audio memory, which allowed him to learn songs after hearing them only a few times, el-Kabli built a repertoire of hundreds of traditional Sudanese songs. His album, Sudan, recorded between 1963 to 1967, remains one of the most important anthologies of Sudanese folk music. Born in Port Sudan, along the Red Sea coast, El-Kabli was inspired by the itinerant folk musicians he heard as a child. Teaching himself to play pennywhistle, and then the oud (lute) and shetern (small drum), he studied their methods of tuning and playing their instruments. Moving to Khartoum at the age of 16 to attend the Khartoum Commercial Secondary School, he went on to study Sudanese folk music and Arabic poetry at the University of Khartoum. Although he took a position as a courts inspector for the clerical division of the Sudanese judiciary, following his graduation, he continued to be fascinated by music. Although he moved temporarily to Saudia Arabia in the late 1970s, he subsequently returned to his homeland. Abdel Karim el-Kabli had been living in the United States in the last few years of his life; he died on December 2, 2021 at the age of 89. ~ Craig Harris