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Cab drivers, children\\u2019s jump rope rhymes, folk songs, dialects, controversial TV\\xa0ads, interviews with blacklisted artists and writers during the McCarthy Era \\u2014 Tony Schwartz was one of the great sound recordists and collectors of the 20th Century.

In honor of Tony Schwartz\\u2019s Centennial, The Kitchen Sisters Present an audio portrait\\xa0of a man who spent his life exploring and influencing the world through recorded sound.

It was 1947 when Tony first stepped out of his apartment in midtown Manhattan with his microphone to capture the sound of his neighborhood.\\xa0He was a pioneer recordist, experimenting with microphones and jury-rigging tape recorders to make them portable (some of these recordings were first published by Folkways Records). His work creating\\xa0advertising and political TV and radio commercials is legendary.

The Kitchen Sisters\\xa0visited Tony in his midtown basement studio\\xa0in 1999. He had just finished teaching a media class at Harvard by telephone \\u2014 Tony was agoraphobic and hardly ever ventured beyond his postal zone. He was there in his studio surrounded by reel to reel tape recorders, mixing consoles, framed photographs and awards \\u2014 and row upon row of audio tapes in carefully labeled boxes.

Tony passed away in 2008. His collection now resides in the Library of congress \\u2014 90.5 linear feet, 230 boxes, 76,345 items \\u2014 some 30,000 folk songs, poems, conversations, stories and dialects from his surrounding neighborhood and 46 countries around the world.

Tony\\u2019s Centennial is being celebrated on April 27, 2023, at the Library of Congress, as part of the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference\\u2014A Century of Broadcasting: Preservation and Renewal.

This story is part of the Lost & Found Sound series produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Jay Allison and NPR. Special thanks to The National Endowment for the Arts and The National Endowment for the Humanities.