Atahualpa Yupanqui, whose real name was Hector Roberto Chavero, was born in El Campo de la Cruz in the province of Buenos Aires in Argentina. His mother was Basque and his father a Quetcha Indian. The young Hector was interested in music from a very early age, and began learning violin and guitar when only six, but after his father’s death in 1921, he gave up his studies in favour of music and poetry. He lived by earning meagre fees here and there, but mostly by doing small menial jobs, which brought him into close contact with the wretched conditions of the workers, mixed race peasants and Indians. This prompted him to join the names of two Inca Emperors (Yupanqui 1471, and Atahualpa 1532) giving Atahualpa Yupanqui, which he took as his own name, thus boldly expressing his very real and total commitment to the cause and culture of the Indian peoples, oppressed since the time of the Spanish conquest. From 1928 onwards, he undertook the huge task of collecting tunes, poems and songs from the popular Indian heritage, and amassed thousands of them, many of which would no doubt have fallen into total oblivion without his intervention. He became the living memory of the Indian popular song with a collection of some 15000 examples, plus nearly a thousand he penned himself. His passion for popular music was behind his meeting with ethnologist Alfred Métraux in 1928; the pair soon became real friends, and united by their common passion for the Amaichas Indians, they went to Bolivia together to study them in 1934. In 1948 Atahualpa Yupanqui was forced into exile because of his opposition to the dicatorship of Juan Peron. He arrived in Paris, where he soon became friends with Aragon, Eluard and Picasso. He became popular in France when he played the opening part of Edith Piaf’s show at the Athénée in 1948, which soon led to an international reputation, with concert appearances all over the world. He had become the bard of that part of South America where poverty and under-development had silenced the voice of the people. He died in Nîmes in 1992.