The music you are drawn to during your life becomes as much a record of who you've been and what you've done as a diary. And because sound is such a powerful mnemonic, music gives you a kind of access to your emotional history that a diary cannot.

But one of the uncomfortable drawbacks of progress, wonderful though it is, is that you can suddenly and rather unexpectedly find yourself roaring off on a river of technology, leaving important things like your music, and a good deal of your emotional history, behind you on the bank.

I have in my mind, particularly, the shift from LPs to CDs. They're so handy, those little discs. Half a dozen of them take up no more room than a couple of cheese sandwiches. They're practically indestructible. And I, for one, was so ready to fall in with the concept that I am now left with half an acre of LPs and nothing to play them on.

Not only that, but there are a ton of artists who faded from the scene like smoke the minute the transition was made - just as actors with bad voices did when they started making talking pictures.

I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that Christmas always reminds me of an artist from whose LPs I am now cut off, and who these days is as hard to find on CD as an MP at the Opening of Parliament who wears a morning suit. John Jacob Niles is one of those Americans for whom there is no precedent - a man so original that he seems to have coalesced from the ether, home-made dulcimer in his hand.

Lots of people these days will remember his songs - "I Wonder as I Wander", "Black is the Color of my True Love's Hair" and perhaps "Go 'Way From my Window". He is credited with writing them, and many others, but actually, he was like an artist who used found objects in his work. Many of his songs are expansions of fragments he heard, or reworkings of older songs, or lyrics attached to tunes borrowed from elsewhere.

The way that worked was like this, as he himself explained: "I Wonder as I Wander' grew out of three lines of music sung for me by a girl who called herself Annie Morgan. The place was Murphy, North Carolina and the time was July, 1933.

"The Morgan family, revivalists all, were about to be ejected by the police, after having camped in the town square for some little time, cooking, washing, hanging their wash from the Confederate monument and generally conducting themselves in such a way as to be classed a public nuisance.

"Preacher Morgan and his wife pled poverty; they had to hold one more meeting in order to buy enough gas to get out of town. It was then that Annie Morgan came out - a tousled, unwashed blonde, and very lovely. She sang the first three lines of the first verse of 'I Wonder as I Wander'. At 25 cents a performance, I tried to get her to sing all the song. After eight tries, all of which are carefully recorded in my notes, I had only three lines of verse, a garbled fragment of melodic material - and a magnificent idea.

With the writing of additional verses and the development of the original melodic material, I Wander as I Wander came into being. "I sang it for five years in my concerts before it caught on. Since then, it has been sung by soloists and choral groups wherever the English language is spoken and sung."

American music is a great melting-pot of influences. Every race and nationality of people who settled in the country brought music that, in its own way, became part of the fabric of what is now American. And people like John Jacob Niles helped weave that fabric, pulling together strands from all over the place to help create something different, yet the same.

He himself was born in bluegrass country, in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1892. Twelve years later, Niles's family moved to a farm in rural Jefferson County where the young John Jacob began collecting folk music. In 1907, Niles composed his first song, Go 'Way from My Window, based on a line of song such by an African-American farm worker.

"In 1908," he wrote, "my father had in his employ a Negro ditchdigger known as Objerall Jacket. As he dug, he sang "Go 'way from my window, go way from my door" - just those words, over and over again, on two notes.

"Working beside Jacket all day (I was 16 at the time), I decided that something had to be done. The results were a four-verse song dedicated to a blue-eyed, blond girl, who didn't think much of my efforts. "The song lay fallow from 1908 to 1929, when I rearranged it and transposed it to a higher key."

That's one of the things that makes John Jacob Niles so odd - he's not a singer with a deep, Barry White-like voice. He's a male alto, which makes him sound like Barry Gibb wearing very, very, very tight trousers.

During the First World War, Niles enlisted in the US Army Signal Corps and served as a reconnaissance pilot. The war enabled him to continue collecting folk songs, our there on the front lines. Back in the US, he studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory and moved to Chicago. There, he sang with the Lyric Opera and performed on Westinghouse radio.

In 1925, he moved to New York and published his first music collections, Impressions of a Negro Camp Meeting (1925) and Seven Kentucky Mountain Songs (1928). He also began an innovative performance career which featured traditional mountain music and African American material in concert with contralto Marion Kerby.

In a sense, he was the first performance artist. And the ballads he loved to sing were the perfect vehicle for his performance art. Ballads are, simply, stories told in song, and Niles was a wonderful story teller.

The dramatic content of the narrative was perfectly matched to his dramatic stage delivery. While singing his song, The Hangman, he caressed his dulcimer like a lover and swung it to and fro as though it were trapped in the hangman's noose. The murder ballad "Pretty Polly", he told in the first person as though he were the lover who stabbed Polly.

At the climactic moment, Niles would take a knife out of his pocket and plunge it repeatedly into Polly's imaginary breast until the listener could practically see her blood flow.

This was certainly not traditional folk performance, but Niles was no traditional folk singer either. He was really a singer of folk music who developed a new audience for traditional music through his dramatic performances.

He was at the forefront of the folk revival in the '50s and '60s, along with people like John Lomax and Harry Smith. Niles took his folk music out of its original context in isolated pockets of Appalachia and introduced it to a much more widely-spread audience through recordings and through concerts.

At a time when radio and record labels were marketing (and cheapening) traditional music as hillbilly and country and western styles, Niles was transforming and presenting those same folk sources as an American art music.

He wrote Christmas carols, which is why he reminds me of Christmas. If you look for him on Amazon or similar sites, you're as likely as not to be taken to albums which are anthologies of Christmas music in which he wrote one or two songs. Niles also wrote about music - his published works include "Songs My Mother Never Taught Me" (1929; with Douglas Moore), "Songs of the Hill Folk" (1934), "The Shape Note Study Book" (1950), and "The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles" (1961). His last work (1972) was the "Niles-Merton Song Cycles", settings of poems of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.

During his lifetime, he amassed a huge collection of music and research material, which is now looked after by the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music, a collaborative effort between the University of Kentucky's School of Music, College of Fine Arts, and the University Libraries (www.uky.edu).

Its work is to provide a focus for the research and performance of American music, embracing both vernacular and cultivated aspects of the field, from the early Colonial period through the present, with special emphasis on the indigenous culture of the Southeastern United States.

John Jacob Niles died on March 1, 1980 at Boothill Farm, near Lexington, Kentucky. Guess I'm just going to have to buy myself a turntable.

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