We’re spoiled here at Sound Beat, listening to and learning about the very best recordings ever made. But as Syracuse University Libraries Cataloger Jennifer Vaughn tells us, sometimes great stories come out of the…not so great recordings.

Read the article right now.

Sound Beat is produced at the Belfer Audio Archive, Syracuse University Libraries.

I’m Brett Barry.

Alice goes down the rabbit hole to find…Elmer Fudd?!

Lewis Carroll’s tale of “Alice in Wonderland” introduced us to iconic characters. There was Alice, of course, The Mad Hatter… and the White Rabbit, heard here in a Decca recording from1944. 

Does the White Rabbit’s voice sound a bit… weww, wascawwy? That’s because it was voiced by Arthur Q. Bryan, who became famous as the voice of Elmer Fudd.  

So…which voice was the original? It’s a question of which came first, the rabbit or the egg. You see, Elmer Fudd evolved from a character named Egghead, who first appeared in nineteen thirty-seven, years before Alice in Wonderland was recorded.

Photo Credit: Arthur Rackham [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m69aPAo1rXE

You’re listening to…oh come on. You know what this is.

Bob Dylan’s 1964 anthem is perhaps inextricable from the decade’s place in American cultural history. But it was released as a 45 in the UK, and inspired by the music on that side of the Atlantic. Said Dylan in a 1985 interview: It was influenced of course by the Irish and Scottish ballads …’Come All Ye Bold Highway Men’, ‘Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens’.

Lyrics like those gave Dylan himself pause on the night of November 23, 1963. President Kennedy had been assassinated the previous day.

‘I thought: Wow, how can I open with that song? I’ll get rocks thrown at me.’ But I had to sing it, my whole concert takes off from there. I know I had no understanding of anything. Something had just gone haywire in the country and they were applauding the song”

Photo: Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. [Entertainment: closeup view of vocalists Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.], 08/28/1963

Tolkien started writing Lord of the Rings in 1937. But a year before that he gave a lecture entitled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”. Beowulf is, of course, the epic poem recognized as one of the most important in the Western Canon. The author is unknown, but the piece has been translated and critiqued by some of the biggest literary names. Tolkien’s interpretation changed the whole game, though. Critics before him made little of Grendel and the poem’s other monstrous beings, as they offered little from a historical standpoint. But Tolkien argued that the monsters really made Beowulf a poem. Without them, he argued, it was just text.

You’ve been listening to the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra with Lament for Beowulf, composed by Howard Hanson and released in 1951.

Many parallels have been drawn between Beowulf and Lord of the Rings…check out Tolkien and Beowulf or this Salon.com article comparing the films.