“Readers of this wonderful historical ethnography may never walk the same way again. Impey demonstrates how women’s walking songs, mouth harp playing, and foot trails express and shape their attitudes toward the injustices they have experienced during more than a century of exploitation and dispossession.  Weaving together historical documents, the memories and songs of older women, and the policies of a transnational conservation preserve, she argues convincingly for a more activist, inclusive, and transdisciplinary ethnomusicology.”

Anthony Seeger, University of California, Los Angeles

“This fine book traverses the landscape of conservation politics, land rights, and apartheid history. Its analyses of harsh struggle and vexed memory are balanced by Impey’s quiet love of the land and by the extraordinary women who walk and sing through her text. Scholars of development and of the aural arts will especially appreciate its achievement.”

Louise Meintjes, Duke University

"Song Walking is an ethnographic account with rich historical narrative on the song repertories, remembered and newly created, of two groups of women living in the border territories of South Africa, Swaziland, and Mozambique, in a space called Maputaland...the book is beautifully written, largely avoiding the jarring presence of academic jargon, to constitute instead, a feeling of warmth, deep respect, even intimacy with these two groups of women singers."

Carol Muller | International Journal of African Historical Studies