Spoken word album

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A spoken word album is a record album that does not consist mainly of music or songs, but of spoken material. Spoken word albums can range from anything to recordings of actual political speeches and/or dramatic readings of historical documents, to dialogue from the soundtrack of a film, to complete performances of plays by Shakespeare or other great authors, stories for children, or standup comedy routines recorded live in nightclubs.

1 Early beginnings
2 LP influence and educational value
3 Decline
4 References

[edit] Early beginnings

There have been spoken word albums since the early days of recording, such as the popular Ronald Colman 1941 version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol on American Decca Records. However, a true milestone was reached when Columbia Masterworks recorded most of Margaret Webster's famed (and never filmed) 1943 Broadway production of Othello, starring Paul Robeson, José Ferrer, and Uta Hagen, on a multi-record 78-RPM set that was later transferred to LP. ^[1] It was the longest spoken word album made up to that time. The album gave millions of listeners who otherwise were unable to attend a theatrical performance a chance to hear Robeson as Othello and Ferrer as Iago. Sales of the album, however, were affected after Robeson was blacklisted by the U.S. government in 1950 for his alleged Communist sympathies.

[edit] LP influence and educational value

After the advent of LP's, spoken word albums became much more common. The Ronald Colman A Christmas Carol was transferred to LP, as were many other spoken word albums made by Decca. Notable Broadway productions, such as the 1950 Don Juan in Hell, the 1953 dramatized reading of the poem John Brown's Body, the original 1962 Broadway cast performance of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and the 1964 Richard Burton Broadway Hamlet, were all recorded complete by Columbia Masterworks. Caedmon Records recorded the complete plays of Shakespeare, as well as recordings of other plays such as Death of a Salesman with original stars Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock, The Glass Menagerie with Jessica Tandy^[2], and Cyrano de Bergerac with Ralph Richardson. ^[3] Many of these albums were played in high school literature classes to enable students to hear the play and follow along in their textbooks at the same time.

After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, memorial collections of his speeches began to appear on LP. Most of the soundtrack of the commemorative 1966 documentary John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums, narrated by Gregory Peck, was released on a Capitol Records LP.

Dialogue excerpts were also released of the film soundtracks of Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew (1967) (on RCA Victor),^[4] and Romeo and Juliet (1968), ^[5] (on Capitol). RCA Victor also released a virtually complete 2-LP album of A Man for All Seasons. RCA Victor was also responsible for complete 4-LP album sets of the Laurence Olivier Othello ^[6] and Zeffirelli's National Theatre of Great Britain production of Much Ado about Nothing. ^[7] Comedy routines by such celebrities as Bill Cosby became extremely popular on Warner Bros. Records. Emlyn Williams recorded an edition of his one-man performance as Charles Dickens (for Argo Records), and Hal Holbrook recorded excerpts from his one-man Mark Twain Tonight! for Columbia Masterworks.

[edit] Decline

With the advent of videocassettes and compact discs, however, the spoken word album went into a serious decline from which it has never really recovered. CD's usually placed more emphasis on music than on the spoken word, and there was little interest in simply hearing a play or a dramatized novel when one could finally buy a video version of it, with both sound and picture, at their local video store or online. While the Cosby albums have resurfaced on CD, most of the other albums mentioned above have not. (Some of the Caedmon albums have been released on CD by Harper Audio, a division of Harper Collins, which now owns Caedmon.) ^[8] The 1968 album of Romeo and Juliet excerpts has also appeared on CD, and Pearl has issued the Robeson Othello in that medium, but the CD edition of the Othello has, unfortunately, attracted little attention in comparison to the history-making vinyl record release of the 1940s ^[9], and now that the Olivier Othello, A Man for All Seasons, and the Zeffirelli versions of Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew are available on DVD, this has become a more preferred way to experience these films rather than merely listening to the dialogue.

Although Naxos Records is a major producer of spoken word CDs, many of the more famous spoken word recordings of the past have yet to appear in the medium.