Earlier this summer, Timi's Uncle Tim told her that their cousin Robin had discovered a new Reedy treasure. She found a small record among her grandmother Beulah's belongings, and she gave it to Tim to pass along to Timi because she was aware of our project. Beulah was John Reedy's sister and was never part of their band, but several of her descendants are members of a contemporary family gospel group known as The Van Nordstroms.
The record is unlike any other in the Reedy collection. It is smaller than a 45 and has a small spindle hole in the middle. It is labeled from John to "All The Family", and its date is "Aug. 10, 19..." but the actual year is difficult to discern. It looks like "1920", but this would have been before John was born.
This new discovery is intriguing for several reasons. According to Collectors Quest, a collectors website, it was produced in a Voice-O-Graph recording booth, which resembles a phone booth, where one could deposit money and speak into the receiver to record a one-of-a-kind audio recording.
The website also indicates that the Voice-O-Graph machines were made around the late 1950s and 1960s, so this would likely place John's recording around the same time period that he and Frances were living part-time in Ohio. So he could have recorded a message "To All the Family" back home in Kentucky.
As noted by the collector/blogger Collin David on this site, "Audio cassettes wouldn’t really become popular until the late 1970s, so in an era where recording equipment was not as readily available as it is today, these were surely thrilling machines. The idea [of] recording oneself for perpetuity and aural immortality is one that appeals to us all. Of course, these records could only be etched once, so the sounds stored on them were completely unique and existed solely on that singular recording."
As we know from their extensive reel-to-reel home recordings (and later cassette recordings), John and Frances consciously documented themselves and their family members, and it seems like the Voice-O-Graph experience could have inspired them to acquire their reel-to-reel recorder before such technology became commonplace and inexpensive.
Of course, the most intriguing part of this discovery is finding out what is on the Voice-O-Graph record! We have contacted Harry Rice to inform him of this new-found recording and our interest in donating it to the Berea College Sound Archives as part of the Reedy collection of commercial and home recordings that we donated and processed as part of our Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship in 2009. We hope that it is in good enough condition to digitize its contents and thus solve the mystery of what John sent to "All The Family" and when.
The record is unlike any other in the Reedy collection. It is smaller than a 45 and has a small spindle hole in the middle. It is labeled from John to "All The Family", and its date is "Aug. 10, 19..." but the actual year is difficult to discern. It looks like "1920", but this would have been before John was born.
This new discovery is intriguing for several reasons. According to Collectors Quest, a collectors website, it was produced in a Voice-O-Graph recording booth, which resembles a phone booth, where one could deposit money and speak into the receiver to record a one-of-a-kind audio recording.
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| Image from http://www.pinrepair.com/arcade/voice.htm |
As noted by the collector/blogger Collin David on this site, "Audio cassettes wouldn’t really become popular until the late 1970s, so in an era where recording equipment was not as readily available as it is today, these were surely thrilling machines. The idea [of] recording oneself for perpetuity and aural immortality is one that appeals to us all. Of course, these records could only be etched once, so the sounds stored on them were completely unique and existed solely on that singular recording."
 |
| Image from http://www.pinrepair.com/arcade/voice.htm |
Of course, the most intriguing part of this discovery is finding out what is on the Voice-O-Graph record! We have contacted Harry Rice to inform him of this new-found recording and our interest in donating it to the Berea College Sound Archives as part of the Reedy collection of commercial and home recordings that we donated and processed as part of our Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship in 2009. We hope that it is in good enough condition to digitize its contents and thus solve the mystery of what John sent to "All The Family" and when.
T & T,
ReplyDeleteThis disc appears to be from the early to mid 1950s per this site: http://tenwatts.blogspot.com/p/voice-o-graph-labelography.html
The contents are John, Frances, and Marie at a carnival at "Lakeshore b_____ "[unintelligible.] They also say "We went down to Indiana last Sunday," so that makes me think they could have been in Ohio or Michigan maybe. I'll get a CD of this to you soon.
John Bondurant