Ken Nordine

I seemed to be surrounded by a mystery so heavy and oppressive I could scarcely breathe…

One of my most cherished/feared childhood memories was listening to Billy Vaughan’s 45 rpm record of The Shifting Whispering Sands:



This performance includes a recitation by legendary voice artist Ken Nordine. Ken’s mellifluous baritone seemed to be everywhere in the last half of the 20th century. He worked with: Fred Astaire, The Grateful Dead, The Jacksons, Tom Waits, David Bowie, Maurice Sendak, and was the voice of numerous commercials. I once ran across his voice in a promo for the AVL ShowPro III, an early slide projector controller that I used when I worked for a school teaching AV arts in the early 1980s. He was also, and most notably, the creator of Word Jazz, a trippy mixture of music and poetry:



Ken passed away a few years ago. I found that the final verse of The Shifting Whispering Sands created an eerie epitaph (although Ken lived in Chicago all his life):

When the day is oddly quiet and the breeze seems not to blow
One would think the sand was resting, but you’ll find this is not so
It is whisp’ring, softly whisp’ring, as it slowly moves along
And for those who stop and listen it will sing this mournful song
Of sidewinders and the horntoads, of the thorny Chaparral
In the sunny days and moonlight nights, the coyote's lonely yell
How the stars seem you could touch them as you lay and gaze on high
At the heavens where we're hoping we'll be going when we die