Speechification

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?

Here’s another terrific RTE documentary. This one’s about emigration but not about the drastic, once-in-a-lifetime emigration of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In this doc we hear the voices of men and women driven from County Mayo in the decades after the second world war by rural poverty to pick potatoes in Scotland and Northern England, usually for months on end and in pretty grim conditions. It’s another beautifully made programme, too: quiet and reflective. The voices do all the work.

Here’s the MP3 and here’s the RTE Documentary on One podcast. There seems to be a disagreement between the programme’s web page - which links to two programmes and gives them different names - and the podcast. Maybe someone from RTE will read this and clarify for us.

Today (by which I mean ‘yesterday’ because I forgot to click ’save’ last night), in Britain, is Remembrance Sunday. The day we remember the ‘glorious dead’ of all the wars since 1914. It’s a complicated and emotional day for me (more so, I find, since my Dad died back in March). It’s a day when I feel like an especially pudgy and pointless middle-aged man while we remember the braver and less pointless men who died in defense of something I take for granted and winge about in approximately equal measure.

I observed today’s two-minute silence standing next to a rugby pitch where my nine year-old was busy training. The boys - girls too - lined up quietly against the low sun while the awful and inspiring stories of those other young men crowded in and made some of us cry.

My Dad (an undemonstrative man who did his national service just after WWII) would listen to the service from the Cenotaph on the radio, weeping every year on this day. This, in fact, is how I learnt that men could cry. He was crying for the men he knew and loved and for the brave men he didn’t know.

Here’s a small and lovely programme that’s full of memory and emotion, about the memorial and crematorium for Indian soldiers who fought and died for Britain. It’s on the South Downs above Brighton and sounds like a lovely place (MP3).

The pic shows Lt. Hardit Singh Malik, a Sikh airman during World War One. I got it from Sikh Heritage in Britain.