Some information about these audio files:

In the summer of 1975, Floyd and Doris Young along with their two children Tracy Renee and Brett Lane drove back to Converse, Louisiana for a visit with Big Mama. Floyd brought with him a tape recorder and recorded some conversations with Big Mama, Big Daddy, Don and Doris Macdonald, Billy, Lloyd, and Harry Young as well as capturing on tape Floyd, Doris, Tracy and Brett.

In the file named, Visit with Big Mama you will hear her talk about being in the hospital. She had leukemia and had undergone chemotherapy at the age of 81 and had been given about three weeks to live by the doctor’s estimation. But she beat it as you will hear her say. She lived another four years past the time of this recording. She passed away on June 7, 1979 just fifteen days shy of Jacy Kay Young being born which would have meant five generations of the same family alive at the same time.

Listening to the file named Floyd and Brett Playing Guitar and Banjo you can hear how good Brett was on the banjo. He was very accomplished already at the age of eleven years old. The sound quality of the recorder wasn’t the best but this was 1975 and the conditions were less than ideal for recording voices, let alone music. But you can still hear how well they played together.

To my knowledge, these are the only recordings of Big Mama’s voice in existence. In 2010 my brother Marvin and I visited Floyd and Doris at their home in Fort Smith, Arkansas and they let me borrow the original tapes so I could turn them into .mp3 files which did two things. It allowed me to put them on the website in a format that everyone can play. And it preserved them forever since recording tape like movie film, deteriorates with time until it is completely gone.

jmy July 2013