Feb 11, 2026–Do you have a recording of your parents’ voices?
I recently followed a story of a radio DJ trying to track down any recording of his late father’s voice.
It turned into a quest worthy of the Holy Grail. His last sample was on a phone answering machine, which was accidently erased in an office move. In the end, he had to go back to 1963 to find a recording of his father arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court.
Of course, most of us don’t have parents who were government lawyers. But isn’t it funny how we took for granted hearing the voices of our moms and dads during our young lives, reading to us, scolding us, cheering for us, talking on the phone, sharing holidays and births and deaths, and arguing around the dinner table about long hair, rock and roll, and the war in Vietnam. Yet once our parents passed on, they left no tangible recording of those voices we still hear in our heads.
Part of it is due to technology. We grew up in the days before Internet and cell phones. But I suspect that even in this cell phone age, many adults don’t think to capture audio of older loved ones.
Back in the 1950s, any type of recording was rare. If you wanted to film Christmas morning, you could use a Kodak Brownie box camera and record four minutes of 8mm film with no sound. I still remember the giant hot lights that dad attached in order to have enough light to shoot indoors. Evidence of this is all the squinty-eyed children huddling around the tinsel-draped pine tree shining like a disco ball.
Audio recording was still a novelty.
Our dad owned a radio, TV, and stereo shop during our growing up years, so we as children had more access to recording technology than most kids of the 1950s.
I still remember the cheap reel to reel mono tape recorder with a crude microphone. We entertained ourselves for hours, fascinated by hearing the sound of our real voices. We sped it up to sound like chipmunks, and slowed it down to sound like dinosaurs, and ran it backward to sound like our favorite Martians. We improvised skits, and chanted silly rhymes. We only owned one reel of tape, so we continually erased it and recorded over and over until it disintegrated in the box on the closet shelf.
By the time I was in high school, I had acquired a professional reel-to-reel tape deck which I used to make multi-track recordings of my original compositions. Hours of those still rest on those tapes, residing in boxes in my barn. I have yet to slog through and convert them to digital.
But as I catalog the recordings they contain – of original songs, live recordings of the various bands I played in, and now interviews with hundreds of musicians, hospital workers, and other subjects of my writing – I don’t believe I have one single minute of my mom’s or dad’s voices.
Not sure why this realization strikes a chord, so to speak. As a child and even in the womb, the first imprint in our forming consciousness is the sound of our parents’ voices. It continues throughout our childhood, into the earnest calls as adults, asking for real estate advice, financial tips, and updates on health and your kids’ activities. The last time you heard them speak might have been literally the last time they could speak. And those voices were undoubtedly reedy and weak, a thin echo of the times they yelled at you to finish your chores or cheered you on at the track meet.
So kids, don’t take it for granted when your folks are yelling at you, singing with you, or telling the same jokes you’ve heard since you were four years old. Pretend it’s the first time you’ve heard it.
It’s the soundtrack of your childhood.