Surprisingly strong reader interest in the Peter Dawson clip I posted earlier. Dawson’s big, round, manly voice [are we still

allowed to say “manly”?] was part of the background wallpaper of my

childhood. I have a stack of tapes of his songs somewhere, perhaps

rotted away by now. When PCs were new I started a project to digitize

them, which is how that one came to be on my disk, but I got distracted

& the project didn’t get far.

Dawson was trained as a singer of classical opera, but his voice was

really more suited to a lowbrow repertoire. He started recording in

cylinder days, and continued right through to the 1950s — one of the

longest of all recording careers, I think.

I’ll try to hunt down some more clips & post them. Dawson was

especially good at singing Kipling’s poems to various arrangements. The

digitizing is a chore to do, though, so this may take a few days. With

the space that sound clips take up, I may be getting into surcharge

territory with my web hosting service, too, so this may not happen at

all. Anyway, right now I have to do some spackling.