This post is a tribute to the remarkable Tony Schwartz, who died a few months ago. It's hard to describe in a few words what Schwartz did. He made aural documentaries, almost countless in number. He was an advertising consultant most famous for the Daisy ad that helped defeat Barry Goldwater in the 1964 US presidential elections. He also was reputedly an agoraphobic who kept to his own neighborhood. To quote his obituary in the New York Times, "In news articles and profiles, Mr. Schwartz was often described as an impassioned visionary and occasionally as a skilled trafficker in truisms with a talent for self-promotion."
Reading the various articles on him, it's hard to know what really is true and what may be embellished. So it's best, perhaps, to listen to his work. Here we have one of his better known products, a Folkways album from 1956 called Sounds of My City, which compiles interesting and characteristic sounds of New York that he recorded during the previous decade on his portable tape recorder.
The record, laconically narrated by Schwartz himself, begins with the sounds of a blues guitarist and includes everything from children's rhymes to subway noises to (pointlessly) a dog barking. In one section, a musician on the docks is poignantly backed by sounds of boat horns. One wonders if that was serendipity - or editing. There is no doubt, however, that this is it worth your time as an aural souvenir of the city as it was several decades ago.
LINK
