11 April 2022
Recording of the week: Parsnip wine and an electric organ
This week's selection comes from Tom Bench, Data Protection Rights Clearance Officer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage.
This recording features Don Prior, who was interviewed for Down To Earth, an oral history project about British horticulture. Like most of the interviews in this collection, the interviewer talks Don through his childhood, his working life (as a gardener for a commercial seed producer), his family life and so on, over the course of several hours.
Unlike most interviewees however, Don also seems to have spent some time alone with the tape recorder, filling an extra cassette with memories of Impington, the Cambridgeshire village where he lived and worked all his life. With no interviewer present to guide him, he ends up telling us about every single shop on Impington high street in the 1930s, the potency of homemade parsnip wine, and the planes he saw at Oakington Aerodrome, among other things. Unusual for this collection, but still firmly in the realm of oral history.
After finishing his last story however, we get something unexpected. Don announces that, as there’s a bit of tape left over, he’s going to fill it by playing us 'some of the old tunes that we used to whistle and sing when we were boys' on his electric organ.
Photo by Thomas van de Vosse (appeltaart) via Flickr.
He’s previously told us that he taught himself to play this organ as a way to wind down after long days in the fields, and that he liked playing for his granddaughter. And for the rest of the tape, that is what we hear: the soft, warm tone of Don’s Yamaha Electone rising out of the tape hiss like a memory.
Don Prior plays the organ [BL REF C1029/21]
It can be a very intimate experience listening to these interviews and hearing people tell the tape about all the things that make up a life, but this unexpected appearance of music at the end of our fifth hour with Don stands out as a particularly personal glimpse into a private world.
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