This article takes into consideration the trajectory of the well-known writer and musical collector and researcher Leda Valladares (1919-2012), opening Argentina’s intellectual history to a complex provincial scene. The first part argues that her interest on bagualas and collective song is explained in Tucuman’s thirties and forties, when the European tradition was intertwined with musical practices of Andean origins that survived in Calchaqui Valleys and Quebrada de Humahuaca, where upscale families used to take summer vacations. It is shown that Leda Valladares’ cultural identity was tensed between the education received in the career of Philosophy and Pedagogy—in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in University of Tucuman—that highlighted German authors embedded with Romanticism, and the singing by the copleras that she discovered in 1941. The latter being considered as subaltern subjects, it is here proposed that their relationship with the researcher was based on complementarity. The second part sustains that Leda Valladares’ thought can be defined as post-colonial avant la lettre and that it has coincidences with the thinking of Rodolfo Kusch. It shows that the project of teaching the collective song in large scale, framed in those postulates, is allied to the Folk movement in the late sixties, it confronts the ideologically driven New Song Movement and, after crossing the last Dictatorship, is taken by Argentinean rockers as expression of musical authenticity.