Recording of the week: the lesbians aren’t into dustbins

This week’s selection comes from Lucia Cavorsi, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. The British Library Sound Archive holds the most exhaustive oral history collection relating to LGBTQ+ lives in the UK: the Hall-Carpenter Oral History Project. Set up in 1985, as part of the wider Hall-Carpenter Archive…

Recording of the week: Champion Jack Dupree interviewed by James Hogg

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…

Private Montford’s army record

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exhibition ‘Listen: 140 Years of Recorded Sound’ will remember a small display of one-of-a-kind voice-recording discs originally made by the public in coin-operated automatic booths.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…

A privilege to be alive on Fair Isle

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…

Recording of the week: turning down Vincent van Gogh’s sunflowers

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…