Alam Lohar was born at Aach Goch in Gujrat district in 1928, a blacksmith's son, and became the great folk voice of Pakistani Punjab.
He sang Jugni and made the version everyone else has copied. He sang the whole qissa repertoire, Heer, Sassi, Sohni, Mirza, and the vaar material, accompanying himself on the chimta, the iron tongs, which he made an instrument in its own right.
He recorded from the 1940s until his death in a road accident in 1979 and his output runs to thousands of items.
His performances were all night and unamplified in his early career, in villages and at shrines, and his repertoire assumed an audience that knew the stories.
He is the clearest evidence that the Punjabi folk canon is shared across the border. The material he sang and the material Kuldeep Manak sang is the same material, in the same language, on either side of a line, with almost no exchange of recordings between the two.
He sang the long narrative forms, Heer, Mirza Sahiban, Sassi Punnu and the Sufi material, in a voice built to carry across a fairground without amplification.
The chimta, the fire tongs with rings, is the instrument he made his own, played as percussion while he sang.
Jugni is the piece everybody knows, and almost every later Punjabi singer on both sides has recorded a version of it. He died in 1979.