Prolific expatriate writer and composer Paul Bowles (1910-1999), who spent his final decades living in Tangier—coinciding in part with French Protectorate rule—was so concerned about the rapid pace of “modernization” in the Kingdom following independence in 1956 that he applied for a grant to record its indigenous musics. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Library of Congress, he assembled a team (Canadian musician Christopher Wanklyn and Moroccan assistant Mohammed Larbi Djilali) and traversed Morocco in Wanklyn’s VW for four months in 1959 (with additional research in 1960-62). Equipped with an Ampex 601 reel-to-reel machine, they recorded musics of several genres in a total of 23 locations (contingent on electrical sources). Bowles, not trained in Ethnomusicology, prepared 140 typewritten field notes from these recording sessions for the Library of Congress. Technological advances have resulted in several mediated iterations of Bowles’s recording project. The original 2-LP set was issued as “Music of Morocco” in 1972 by the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. In 2016, a boxed set with 4 CDs and illustrated leatherette booklet was released by the Dust-to-Digital label. Ethnomusicologist Philip D. Schuyler edited Bowles’s field notes for each musical selection and added his commentary on the music, along with a general introduction. The Bowles project has had an online presence since 2016 with Archnet, an open-access resource of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT—integrating photographs, audio, and scans of the original field notes, without commentary. This platform is arguably the most “raw” encounter for the viewer/listener. A 2014 news release from the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (which digitized the Bowles audio files) speaks of “repatriating” Morocco’s musical heritage “after more than fifty years in the vaults of the Library of Congress.” This paper interrogates issues raised by Bowles’s original recording project and its subsequent offshoots. Was there a consciousness of intellectual property rights for the musicians performing the repertoire in the recording sessions? Is it problematic that the original “team” did not include a specialist in Moroccan music/culture? What do Bowles’s field notes reveal about his understanding of indigenous Moroccan musical culture, and his own “Western gaze”? How did the concept of “ownership” shape later projects? To what extent do these iterations represent “repatriation” of Moroccan musical culture? I will discuss the implications of these questions in the context of the ethics of “knowledge diffusion” (Post 2017).