Speechification

I don’t think I’d had the nerve to post another Archive Hour, it seems we do it every week, but this one was a listener request so I couldn’t resist. And it is a complete audio joy. The words, the voices, the music are all great, a welcome departure from the Radio 4 norm in the use of music. But the sheer sound of it is delicious. Lots of crackly phones, under-powered tape recorders, badly tuned radios. It’s incredibly evocative. Hats off to Brook Lapping who made it, and in an absolutely unheard departure for a radio production company, mention it on their website! Genius. MP3 here.

A mini-post featuring something from Charles Wheeler’s archive: three-and-a-half minutes recorded on the fourth of April 1968, the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination (MP3).

I’ll admit that by the end of his 58-year Sunday morning reign I was thoroughly bored of Alistair Cooke, droning on as he had for all of my remembered years plus about another twenty. Reading his unending bloody series of bloody letters, all from bloody America (did he never go anywhere else?). Now, though, revived for one week only, four years after his death (and all that nastiness with the stolen body), I hear something quite different—and it’s a real joy. It’s his language, of course: so courtly but also relaxed, effortless. He was an extraordinary communicator.

The BBC’s North America editor, Justin Webb, has picked five letters, each from a different US election campaign, going all the way back to 1948. Here’s number two, which is about an incident in Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign at the height of the Vietnam War. The other programmes are here. but you’ll have to get a move on: the clock is ticking and they’ll be replaced by next week’s Book of the Week… er… next week.

Ooh, lovely. A ten-part history of the FBI from Tom Mangold - in bite-size fifteen-minute chunks. Not currently available as a podcast - which is a real pity. Wouldn’t it be nice to listen to a new episode each morning on the way to work? Terrific stuff, anyway, with lots of interesting contributors, Mangold’s authoritative tone and plenty of that terrific pre-war archive stuff about the red peril. Here’s episode one, which is about the early days, obviously. The other episodes should show up here, as they go out.

Sometimes good radio leaves me in awe. It’s the patience, the respect for material, the attention to process. Here’s a good example. Sarah Cuddon has visited and recorded the wives of the first generation of American astronauts and she’s come back with something quite thoughtful, sad and lovely (MP3).

John Steinbeck called them “the last free men”, and American mythology has a special place for the rail-riding hobo. This unencumbered hero, the happy-go-lucky bum, is an icon that occupies strange territory today, being so at odds with materialistic 21st century society.

Hobo Heaven (MP3), a documentary dredged up from the BBC World Service archives, tries to find out the truth behind these images of the itinerant boxcar rider - and goes to the National Hobo Convention (held every year in the tiny middle American town of Britt, Iowa) to see whether the hobo’s freedom is just a myth.

Here’s a lovely example of the kind of material that the Kitchen Sisters gathered for their Lost and Found Sounds show on NPR (the show itself is off the air). This one’s got stories from early radio in Nashville, a really marvelous train whistle and the legendary Sam Phillips from Sun Records. I ripped this MP3 from a 2000 Real stream. There are lots of other shows - all excellent and unbelievably varied - here and you could, if you felt like it, give the Kitchen Sisters some money to help them make more.

I’m putting this up quick because I reckon the five (five already!) Speechification contributors will be racing to do so. Since the rest of them probably have better things to do with their Saturday nights, I’m first! It’s another Archive Hour (I love the Archive Hour).

This one celebrates found and accidental and informal and amateur recordings collected by American independent media celebrities the ‘Kitchen Sisters’, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, for broadcast on their NPR radio show Lost and Found Sound.

If Russell’s last selection was Speechification crack, then this one must be Speechification cocoa. It’s full of breathtaking recordings from sources you won’t believe: 9/11 voicemail messages, a Buster Keaton sing-along, Tennessee Williams mucking around with his friends, a man who actually heard the Gettysburg Address… Moving and joyful stuff. (MP3).

And another thing: why don’t they just turn Saturday Live into a British Lost and Found Sound?

What a story. Every year at around this time hundreds of young men - mostly from Britain and Australia - travel to the American wheat belt (the big, flat bit in the middle) to drive those house-sized combine harvesters and those train-length grain trucks and, basically, bring in the harvest.

Point of information: this particular adventure is not suitable for your mid-life crisis. Only under-30s need apply. Damn (MP3).

The pic - taken in Montana - is by goatopolis