This week’s selection comes from Catherine Smith, World & Traditional Music volunteer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. Champion Jack Dupree (1910-1992) was a blues and boogie-woogie pianist and singer from New Orleans. James Hogg’s 1968 interview with him for Radio 4 gives a fascinating insight into his life as a…

Those of you who visited last year’s British Library exhibition ‘Listen: 140 Years of Recorded Sound’ will remember a small display of one-of-a-kind voice-recording discs originally made by the public in coin-operated automatic booths. Among these was a single ‘Voices of the Forces’ disc, loaned to us, like the other…

Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds, writes: It may come as little surprise, but wildlife sound recordists are usually absent from their recordings. It makes perfect sense, of course; the primary aim of these recordings is to capture the vocalisations of a particular animal or the collective sounds…

This week’s selection comes from Camille Johnston, Oral History Assistant Archivist. In his life story recording the artist Michael Rothenstein related a remarkable story about an encounter between his teacher A. S. Hartrick and the artist Vincent van Gogh. Michael Rothenstein (1908-1993) was a painter, printmaker, and teacher. He taught…

Negusa Nagast (King of Kings) Menelik II of Ethiopia Guest blog by Eyob Derillo of the British Library Ethiopian collection The year 2019 marks the 175th anniversary of the birth of King Menelik II, one of Ethiopia’s most famous and influential monarchs. King Menelik and his wife Queen Taytu bequeathed…