walking upstream…
His birth year moves depending on the source — the Punjab Guardian says 1906, Wikipedia's infobox says 1910, Wikipedia's own category tags say 1914 — but every account agrees Lal Chand Yamla Jatt was born in Chak No. 384, Lyallpur district, in what is now Pakistan, to Khera Ram and Harnam Kaur. He worked as a gardener and sold flower garlands as a boy, and by some Punjabi-language accounts of his life never learned to read or write, holding every lyric in memory alone. After partition sent him to Ludhiana, he recorded for HMV from 1952 until his death in 1991, popularizing the tumbi as a solo lead voice and earning the honorific Ustad Ji — later shortened simply to Yamla Jatt, and sometimes Lal Chand Yamla. Contemporaries called him gaayki da baba bohar, the banyan tree of singing that a generation of Punjabi folk vocalists sheltered under.
The same Punjabi profile is the most specific source on Dyal: it states that 17 ਕੁ ਸਾਲ ਦੀ ਉਮਰ 'ਚ ਹੀ ਯਮਲੇ ਨੇ ਪੰਡਤ ਸਾਹਿਬ ਦਿਆਲ ਜੀ ਤੋਂ ਵੰਝਲੀ, ਅਲ਼ਗੋਜ਼ੇ, ਸਾਰੰਗੀ, ਦੋ ਤਾਰਾ ਤੇ ਇੱਕ ਤਾਰਾ ਵਜਾਉਣੇ ਸਿੱਖੇ — translated: 'At around age seventeen, Yamla learned to play flute, algoze, sarangi, do-tara and ik-tara from Pandit Sahib Dyal ji.' Two other profiles fold this into general 'vocal training,' but the Punjabi original is instrument-specific — a crash course across the whole family of folk strings and reeds a working singer needed, the same family he'd later strip down to one string.
listen forThere's no Dyal recording to set beside it, but 'Das Main Ki Pyar Wichon Khattya' — his best-known HMV side, reissued for decades since — is the clearest place to hear where that training landed: the tumbi carrying the whole melody alone on one string while his voice moves around it, the same one-instrument-does-everything logic the sarangi, do-tara and ik-tara lessons were teaching him before he ever picked up the smaller instrument.
The richest account is in Punjabi. Writing in the Punjab Guardian in 2024, journalist Darshan Singh Preetiman records that ਯਮਲਾ ਜੀ ਸਿਰਫ 9 ਕੁ ਸਾਲ ਦੀ ਉਮਰ ਵਿਚ ਹੀ ਗਾਇਕੀ ਵੱਲ ਖਿੱਚੇ ਗਏ ਤੇ 'ਆਸੀ ਜੀ' ਨੂੰ ਉਸਤਾਦ ਧਾਰ ਲਿਆ — translated: 'Yamla ji was drawn to singing at just around age nine, and took Aasi ji as his ustad.' Two English-language profiles separately confirm that Aasi 'honed his writing skills.' It matters because, by other Punjabi accounts of his life, Yamla Jatt never learned to read — so whatever a poet taught a nine-year-old had to survive in memory alone, never on a page.
listen forNo recording of Aasi survives, so listen for what an oral-only songwriting apprenticeship sounds like on the page it never touched: on 'Aar Tangan Paar Tangan,' the verses fall into short, proverb-like couplets built for memory rather than print, internal rhymes doing the work a written draft would otherwise do. It's the shape of a song designed to be carried whole in a singer's head — by one account an illiterate singer's head — rather than checked against a manuscript.
Once the instruments were in hand, the Punjab Guardian records a third, separate apprenticeship: ਪਿੱਛੋਂ ਪੱਕੇ ਰਾਗਾਂ ਦੀ ਸਿੱਖਿਆ ਹਾਸਲ ਕਰਨ ਲਈ ਚੌਧਰੀ ਮਜੀਦ ਦਾ ਲੜ ਫੜ ਲਿਆ — translated: 'Afterward, to gain instruction in proper ragas, he took hold of Chaudhry Majid's coattails.' Two English profiles collapse Majid into the same 'vocal training' credited to Dyal, but the Punjabi original keeps him distinct — not folk instruments, but pakke raag, the classical melodic grammar sitting underneath the folk surface, a separate debt paid to a separate teacher.
listen forMajid left no recording to check the claim against, so listen for the classical layer inside a folk register instead: 'Satguru Nanak Teri Leela Nyaari Ae' sets a plain devotional lyric against melodic runs that stretch and bend well past what the words alone require — the kind of trained ornamentation a folk singer doesn't invent on his own. It has to have been taught, and the Guardian says who taught it.