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Lost & Found Sound NPR's Lost & Found Sound series explores newly discovered audio and music sessions, home audio, and listener submitted sounds and interviews. Subscribe to the RSS feed of never before played audio and sounds.

Lost & Found Sound

Twentieth Century Wars on Tape

Over 37 million men and women have served in the armed forces and fought in the major wars this century. They bequeathed us a legacy of recorded sound that captures the breadth of experience of war, as Quest for Sound Curator Jay Allison demonstrates.

Twentieth Century Wars on Tape

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Vermont's Archive of Folk Songs

Helen Hartness Flanders spent 35 years preserving Vermont's vanishing folk songs. She eventually collected more than 4,000 songs by carrying sound equipment to remote corners of the state -- and by charming residents into singing for her.

Vermont's Archive of Folk Songs

Listen · 7:13
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Pan American Blues

One of the first letters sent to Lost and Found Sound came from a listener who told us that no series about the sounds of the 20th century would be complete without the sound of the Pan American Train passing the WSM Radio tower in Nashville. The 10,000 watt station broadcast the sound live each day at 5:08pm - Nashvillians and listeners from all across the South and Midwest set their clocks by the sound.

Pan American Blues

Only Available in Archive Formats.

San Francisco's Chinatown Funeral Band

Lost and Found Sound looks at the Green Street Mortuary Band from San Francisco's Chinatown. More than 300 Chinese families a year hire the band to give their loved ones a proper and musical send-off through the streets of Chinatown. For more than 50 years, this amateur band performed for its community at nearly every big event.

San Francisco's Chinatown Funeral Band

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Sam Phillips' Memphis Recording Service

We present the first of our Lost & Found Sound Memphis trilogy with this portrait of the early years of Sam Phillips and his legendary Memphis Recording Service. This was before he recorded Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. Interviews with Sam, his family, Ike Turner and others are interwoven with the remote recordings he made of talent shows, funerals and proms to support his passion for recording the raw unrecorded music of the 1950s South.

Sam Phillips' Memphis Recording Service

Only Available in Archive Formats.
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