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‘Every recording carries the air of a seance’: remembering my father the music archivist


Researching a novel about forgotten blues musicians led me to revisit the life’s work of my late dad: disinterring decades of dusty recordings that will outlive us all

Sony Music is a behemoth, the industry’s biggest hitter, with annual earnings of about $10.7bn (£8bn) and a lineup of talent (Springsteen, Beyoncé, Jackson, Bowie) that reads like a rock’n’roll hall of fame. I have PTSD flashbacks of him leaning precipitously over the platform edge to check for the approach of the uptown train, and hobbling with his stick through the rush-hour crowds at Penn station. The plan was to write a feature about music archiving but life intervened, as it usually does, and I wound up sticking the material in a drawer, as though it were a flop disco album or a failed Sony soul singer.

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