Researching a novel about forgotten blues musicians led me to revisit the life’s work of my late dad: disinterring decades of dusty recordings that will outlive us all

My dad, Michael Brooks, was an archivist, a music salvage expert. He worked deep into old age at Sony’s New York office: curating the company’s labyrinthine back catalogue; sourcing and restoring antique steel recordings. Possibly, we all circle back to the songs of our youth, but Dad went upriver and made the past his profession. On workdays he sat in a Manhattan studio and listened to the dead sing and play on a two-track Studer tape deck.

Sony Music is a behemoth, the industry’s biggest hitter, with annual earnings of about $10.7bn (£8bn) and a lineup of talent (Springsteen, Beyoncé, Jackson, Bowie) that reads like a rock’n’roll hall of fame. But Sony’s marquee names are only the tip of the iceberg. For every Diana Ross, Johnny Cash or Billy Joel who struck gold, there were a hundred other signed artists who didn’t. For every song that is in print and available, there are at least 10 that are mothballed in storage, an estimated 2.5m pieces that may as well not exist. Popular taste has decreed that these lost songs are failures. But tastes change, markets shift and yesterday’s flop might be today’s buried treasure. “A lot of it is awful,” my dad used to say. “But even the awful work is interesting, significant, and now and again you stumble across something special.”