Big Mamma Revisited
Lost and Found Sound -- Listener Contributions
Big Mamma Revisited
Catie Vance, age 4. Steven Vance hide caption
Michael Castellana as a newborn with his family, including mother Anna, 1955. Michael Castellana hide caption
During 1999, Lost and Found Sound left open a voicemail box so that listeners could contribute ideas or recordings of their own. We called it the Quest for Sound project. And every call was entered into a database, affectionately called "Big Mamma."
Big Mamma curator Jay Allison went through some of the highlights among the more than 1500 calls. There was Hoover the talking seal; Steven Vance’s daughter talking to a sick relative; Bill Murphy describing a tape he made for his daughter at college; Trudy Avi’s late husband on an answering machine message; and Michelangelo Castellana’s mother singing Happy Birthday, even though she lost much of her voice to throat cancer.
Beyond those items, there are grandmothers singing, fathers sending letters home from war, an interviews with great-grandfathers, strangers telling stories, adopted children finding their parents, weddings and speeches. While many of them could not be broadcast, the Lost and Found Sound team appreciated of each one they received.
After this broadcast, Lost and Found Sound was no longer heard every week. But the pieces continued to be part of an occasional series.