Darcy Bacon
Project Asscociate
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Scrapbook Quest for Sound Memories
Darcy Bacon
Project Associate
The Quest for Sound fills me with pride and wistfulness. Listeners have
such extraordinary trust in us-- their willingness to share their sad,
haunting, silly, precious, noble, ignoble moments on the air; their
eagerness to go to extraordinary lengths to find and give their recording
to us with few if any questions asked. I feel a kinship with them, and a
sense of loss at all the remarkable offerings there isn't time to hear--and
the others so generously given that we heard but couldn't air. We've
barely touched the treasures held out to us. In the short message time,
people told us a lot, often calling back again and again to help us
understand why we had to hear their bit of sound. Their messages sometimes
brought them to tears, and me too. Others made me laugh out loud. I could
feel the emotions they described in their eagerness but even when their
voices were flat or they read messages from a script to get them just
right. There are many people I heard on those tapes I'd like to know and
voices I won't forget.
Priscilla Warner from Washington state told wonderfully of a Kentucky coal
miner she met on a beach who was at the negotiating table with John L.
Lewis. A Harrisburg, Pennsylvania mother taped her adopted daughter the
day she arrived from India learning English, singing songs, missing her
home. A man on his honeymoon in England caught the unforgettably eerie
sound of the train announcer's voice from the platform; a daughter brought
alive her mother's terrifying telling of the story "The Blueberry Witch" on
a family vacation trip.
I want to know the tale of the four tapes of Martin Luther King talking
about Vietnam found by a caller in the drawer of an antique desk. I'd like
to hear the memories of the lady who lived in the Cabrini-Green housing
project in Chicago and took the bus to the suburbs to clean houses. I was
intrigued by the story of a group of musicians on motorcycles in a desert
tavern taping an old cowpuncher named Sourdough Berry. I laughed with the
man who made a pet of the tree frog he found in a bag of spinach at the
Safeway-- and with the screenwriter whose script for his own wedding kept
the audience from realizing it was real until the last scene. I want to
hear about a mother's first day as a widow on a Utah farm. I heard the
ache in the voice of the divorced man who'd saved the voices of his two
daughters on his phone machine pleading with him to come home.
My curiosity was roused by the Idaho woman whose father-in-law robbed a
bank in 1924. I envied the officers at Westover Air Force base who heard
the trumpet and banter of Louis Armstrong when he played there during World
War II. I loved the image of the young girl talking to herself through an
open door about running away on a warm spring Kentucky day in 1968. And I
was grateful for the patience of Philip Burno who kept calling back until
he finished the loving telling of his African-American family's story.
Sometimes the memory of the tape is the best part, but it's tantalizing to
leave so much fascinating territory unexplored. The consolation is knowing
we've caused people recall and revisit sounds they hadn't listened to or
thought about in years, had been afraid to hear or hadn't known how. We
started something exciting and the listeners can take it from here.
Darcy Bacon
Project Associate
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Copyright © 1999 The Kitchen Sisters
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