Robert Kimball, a musical theater historian and champion of American popular song who unearthed hundreds of pieces long thought to be lost and helped rediscover the work of the seminal Black Broadway songwriting team of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 86.

Mr. Kimball projected the aspect of an academic but often acted as a song-hunting Indiana Jones; never more stirringly than in his excavation of the so-called “Secaucus Warehouse,” a forgotten mother lode that went back to the advent of “talking pictures.” Warner Bros., the movie studio responsible for “The Jazz Singer,” had bought up a number of historic music publishing houses to handle the studio’s new soundtrack needs, in the aftermath of its groundbreaking 1927 “talkie.” These music holdings were parked, physically, in a variety of offices and warehouse around the New York metropolitan area, before finally being dumped into one faceless repository in Secaucus, New Jersey. There they sat, untouched and forgotten, until 80 crates were stumbled upon in 1982 and Mr. Kimball was called in.

What he found was unprecedented, a horde of original manuscripts by the giants of American music: nearly 70 unknown songs by George Gershwin, including missing scores to many of his briefer-lived Broadway musicals; more than 175 unpublished songs by Jerome Kern, including half-an-hour of music cut from “Show Boat;” forgotten manuscripts by Vincent Youmans, Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml and other masters, as well as original orchestrations by the pioneering orchestrators of the Broadway musical — Frank Saddler, Hans Spialek and Robert Russell Bennett.

“The first envelope I opened, which had ‘Cole Porter’ written on it, had songs I’d never heard of — and I’m a Cole Porter scholar and biographer,” Mr. Kimball told the Los Angeles Times. “I sat there quite stunned.”

Mr. Kimball was tasked with cataloguing the contents of his discovery. The work took him and a team of specialists years, but the results restored innumerable “lost” musicals and their songs to the repertory.

This represented but a fraction of Mr. Kimball’s contribution to the field. He was a former Curator of Yale University’s American Musical Theatre Collection, and an artistic advisor to the Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin estates. He co-wrote lush, coffee-table-size biographies of Porter and the Gershwins, and compiled similarly lavish, definitive compendiums of the complete lyrics of Porter (1983), Lorenz Hart (1986), Ira Gershwin (1993), Irving Berlin (2001), Frank Loesser (2003) and Johnny Mercer (2009). He collaborated with the composer William Bolcolm on “Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake” in 1973, a groundbreaking retrospective volume that documented the team’s long career, with vintage photos, sheet music, theatrical ephemera and — most crucially — firsthand interviews with both men, returning their immense contributions to the spotlight.

As Mr. Kimball told Terry Gross in a 2016 appearance on her NPR show, “Fresh Air,” he was looking to build the Yale collection archives at the time. “Bert Lahr, the great actor-comedian — suggested that ‘the very first people you should contact are Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake,’” Mr. Kimball recalled. “So actually, it was Bert Lahr who arranged for [his son] John Lahr and myself to go up and meet Noble Sissle. This would’ve been in the spring of 1967.”

Sissle, as it happened, was about to throw out all his old files and memorabilia; he felt no one was interested in them. “And by this miracle we were able to get there in time,” Mr. Kimball marveled. “We didn’t know how close we were to losing this extraordinary heritage. ‘Well, if this interests you fellas,’ Sissle said, ‘I’ll call my old pal up and we can go out and visit him in Brooklyn.’ Sissle drove us to 284A Stuyvesant Avenue, where Eubie and Marian Blake lived. And we were greeted there by Eubie, and the afternoon that I spent was one of the most memorable in my life.”

Robert Kimball was born in New York City on August 23, 1939, the son of Morris Kimball, who headed his own plastics firm, and Eve (Schulman) Kimball. He attended the Fieldston School and Yale College, graduating in 1961. From May 1962 to October 1963, he was Legislative Assistant to Representative John V. Lindsay, just before Mr. Lindsay ran for Mayor of New York City. In the Fall of 1963, he became Director of the Republican Legislative Research Association, with the primary responsibility of drafting and carrying out legislative strategy for passage of the Civil Rights Act. (Mr. Kimball later published a book about this work, “Crisis and Compromise: The Rescue of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — A Memoir.”) He entered Yale Law School in the Autumn of 1964, joining a class that included future-Senator Joe Lieberman and future-CNN commentator Jeff Greenfield, receiving his degree in 1967.

He’d been in love with the Broadway musical since seeing Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun” at the age of seven. While majoring in American studies at Yale, he wrote his senior thesis on Broadway musicals of the late-1920’s. When Cole Porter died and left his papers to his alma mater, Yale, in 1965, Mr. Kimball got a summer job cataloguing them. In 1967, after the death of Yale’s reigning Musical Theatre Collection curator, Mr. Kimball was offered the position. “Instead of going to work for the Justice Department or some big law firm, that’s what I did,” he later said, in an interview with the Boston Globe. “A lot of people thought I was a little wacky.”

He held the post until 1971. On May 23, 1972, Mr. Kimball married Abigail Kuflik, who worked at Newsweek magazine as a writer and editor for most of their marriage. On their first date, he’d taken her to see Bobby Short at the Café Carlyle. She survives him, as do their two children, Philip and Miranda, along with three grandchildren.

From 1973-1986, Mr. Kimball was a music and dance critic for the New York Post, and chief classical music critic from 1986-1988. He wrote liner notes copiously, most notably for “Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter” (1971) and “Bobby Short Is K-RA-ZY for Gershwin” (1973), two of the cabaret legend’s signature albums, as well as the original cast albums of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” (1979), Merrily We Roll Along” (1982) and “Sunday in the Park with George” (1984). He was a founding member of the advisory committee for “Encores!,” the celebrated musicals-in-concert revival series at New York’s City Center, and a consultant to the Library of Congress, the Packard Humanities Institute’s musical theater recording project, the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, the Chicago Humanities Festival and the estate of Irving Berlin.

In 1971, just after the publication of his first book, “Cole,” Mr. Kimball received his first phone call from Irving Berlin. “I was a little stunned, I have to say,” Mr. Kimball admitted to the Globe. “He wanted to talk about Cole Porter with me. He probably talked for a couple of hours. It was the first of many phone conversations we had over the years.”

Of all the songwriters Mr. Kimball personally came to know, “Mr. Berlin” (as he always insisted on calling him), was perhaps his favorite. Every Christmas, until the composer’s death in 1989 at the age of 101, Mr. Kimball led a group of carolers to the Berlin home on Sutton Place to sing “White Christmas” and other seasonal songs beneath his window. Yet, Mr. Kimball never abandoned his critical perspective entirely. “Irving Berlin also wrote some of the worst songs anyone ever published — as he himself said,” Mr. Kimball noted. Mr. Kimbal, nevertheless, offered this consolation to Mr. Berlin: “Well, Babe Ruth struck out a lot too.”

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