Till the World Will Sing Again

Two summers ago I set out to fully document the contents of an old family cassette tape collection from the 1980s. While taking a deeper dive into my great Uncle Bryan Banister's tapes one evening, all of a sudden I heard the sounds of singing and piano accompaniment. Surprised by the unexpected discovery, I played the tape several more times, and then went through the other six tapes recorded by Bryan.

The practice of recording and sending tape messages between members of my grandfather's generation (usually consisting of informal and intimate one-way conversations) was quite popular in the 1980s. And while these particular tapes of Bryan's were recorded in the 1980s, the music that he was sharing on them was actually from the 1970s—he was simply capturing the the output of his old reel-to-reel tape recorder on his more modern cassette tape recorder.

The music in question dated from a few occasions when Bryan and his sister, Junelle (both in their early 50s at the time) visited with one another. Being very musically oriented, as were all of my grandfather's siblings, performing songs and hymns together during such visits was apparently quite common. It allowed them to bond in a way that evoked fond memories of doing the same while growing up.

Last spring I submitted a one-hour arrangement drawing from this collection to a syndicated program called Framework Radio. Bryan introduces at the beginning and wraps up at the end, but the bulk of it is just the sibling duo singing, playing piano, and bonding.

At the very end, Bryan says, "...you might stow this away in the archives, and somewhere along the way your children, or grandchildren, or whatever, might enjoy listening to this." I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.