LADYSMITH Black Mambazo have just released the most personal album of their five-decade career.

As can be heard when they play the York Barbican on Monday, Songs From A Zulu Farm comprises songs that older members of the South African vocal group would have heard or sung themselves on farms in the 1940s and 1950s.

Founder and group leader Joseph Shabalala, for example, grew up on a white-owned farm near the town of Ladysmith in KwaZulu-Natal, once the heart of the Zulu kingdom, which he left in 1958 to work in nearby Durban.

He formed his own group, The Black Ones, in 1960, renaming them Ladysmith Black Mambazo in 1964, and so began a career now encompassing more than 50 recordings. Much of that music has been rooted in the vocal tradition of isicathamiya singing, an a cappella style that originated among South Africa’s black miners, transported far from their home to work six-day weeks. On the seventh, they sang.

Today the group spearheads a foundation to teach this tradition to young South Africans, but their new album harks back to their childhood, their Zulu homeland, their roots and native traditions and a world of innocence and joy.

“We’re always talking about the farm life,” says long-standing Ladysmith member Albert Mazibuko. “Then one day one of our American friends was talking to our manager, and we took him to the place where we grew up, and we talked about the music we sang when we were growing up, and he said, ‘Why don’t you record those songs?’”

At concerts, Ladysmith had still been singing those songs backstage, as a way of bonding together and recalling their roots.

“But we never thought we would record them as they weren’t political songs, which we’re more associated with, but then we thought, ‘Let’s put them together on an album’ – and we didn’t need to rehearse them that much, as we already knew them so well,” says Albert.

Some of the songs appear on the album in exactly the form they were first sang; others have had extra harmonies and lyrics added.

“Some of them are very old; most of the songs I heard my grandmother sing when I was a child and they’ve been passed from generation to generation,” says Albert.

“There are songs about rain, crops… and then there’s a song about snakes [Mtulube, Away, You River Snakes] as we don’t want to share the water on the farm with snakes.”

The songs’ melodies and harmonies were rearranged by Joseph Shabalala for Ladysmith’s more commercial sound on the album, “but we could still sing them in the field”, says Albert.

One song, the closing track in fact, is not South African in origin: Old McDonald… Zulu style! Yes, that Old MacDonald.

“You know, I never heard that song before, but I think it’s great. I was amazed that even people in the western world were so attached to their animals and farm life, and we were told about this song by our manager,” says Albert.

“When we heard it, it sounded so good that we recorded it without a rehearsal, putting it to Zulu lyrics, and it’s going down really well in our concerts because everyone joins in.”

Songs From A Zulu Farm is potentially the first in a trilogy of albums with historical roots entitled Our South African Life.

“We’re talking about doing an album of gospel songs that aren’t being sung right now and we’re also thinking about recording songs that were sung a long time ago when people couldn’t find work and would take to the mountains,” says Albert. “We feel that if we can research and record those songs, we can preserve them.”

• Ladysmith Black Mambazo play York Barbican on Monday, 7.30pm. Tickets update: still available on 0844 854 2757.