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As collectors of folk songs and stories, the Warners' field recordings were critical to their work. Although they began collecting in 1938, beginning in 1940, using a Wilcox Gay Recordio disk recorder, the Warners were able to save the audio of songs they heard on their collecting trips. Often these might be truncated versions of songs -- where two or three verses would be sung and the words of the entire song transcribed in writing -- because blank disks were both expensive and limited in their recording capacity. Lena Bourne Fish was the first singer they recorded, in New Hampshire, in July 1940, and the next month had their first recording session on North Carolina's Outer Banks, recording, among others, C.K. "Tink" Tillett. Also in 1940, the Warners again visited Beech Mountain, North Carolina, recording the Hicks family and Frank Proffitt for the first time (the recording took place at a filling station in Matney, where there was available electricity). In 1941, a friend of the Warners and then-vice president of Philco, David Grimes, created a battery-powered portable recorder that gave the Warners greater flexibility in recording in communities that did not yet have electricity. Continuing to adapt to developments in technology, in 1950 the Warners transitioned to tape recording.