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My young boy's heart melted when I heard Scourby speak.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
An Easter evocation: Scripture comes alive on the Internet


March 27, 2005


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard

   I grew up listening to Alexander Scourby.
   My mom's mother was blind, and I read to her as often as I could. She loved the Bible.
   I was reading the Psalms to her one afternoon after school when a new shipment of 16-rpm Talking Book records arrived for the suitcase-size record player she got on loan from the Library of Congress. She never had trouble fitting the big records onto the spindle, but I offered to do it for her. That's when I discovered the only voice that ever made me cry.
   From that day on, my emotions lived in two worlds. One was the sphere inhabited by me and my family, me and my friends, me and my school and Scouts and church. The other was the private world of me and Alexander Scourby.
   I've sometimes wondered if there are only two kinds of people in the world -- those who have fallen under the spell of Scourby's voice and those who will someday. Scourby, who was born to Greek immigrants in Brooklyn in 1913, was an accomplished stage and screen actor who spent thousands of hours in sound booths recording books for the blind. Over a period of half a century, Scourby recorded 300 books for the Talking Books program of the Library of Congress.
   The one he is most famous for is, of course, THE book, the good book. It was Scourby's narration of The King James Version of the Bible that captured my young mind in the mid-1950s. His voice wrapped itself around words and phrases, keeping them safe from a world too busy to listen.
   He shaped his sounds like a singer. If Frank Sinatra was America's crooner, someone said after Scourby died in 1985, then Alexander Scourby was the Sinatra of narrators.
   As a boy, I listened to every nuance of Scourby's King James Bible with a fascination that even today seems difficult to explain. Perhaps I felt entranced by the rhythms of the Elizabethan translation -- the work commissioned by James I is surely the most poetic of all the English versions of the Christian Bible -- and perhaps, too, I felt drawn to Scourby's readings by my own interest in radio.
   What I did know, at age 11, was that my young boy's heart melted when I heard Scourby speak. My grandmother couldn't see my tears, but she could tell what was happening. "Don't be embarrassed," she said softly. "It does it to me, too."
   It had been 45 years since the last time I'd heard Scourby's recitation. But last month, as I was looking for information on King James I and his times -- one of his loyal subjects, let us not forget, was William Shakespeare himself -- I found a link to a Web site that sells audio Bibles. They were read by my childhood hero, Alexander Scourby.
   You could get Scourby's rendition on cassette or on CD. You could even get it on a disk that played only on a Windows PC. But the site -- www.audio-bible.com -- offered something that turned my evening into an evocation. By clicking links at the left, you could listen to Scourby's entire narration of the King James Version, book by book, chapter by chapter.
   I didn't get much sleep that night. I started with the Psalms and sat at my keyboard, eyes closed, stopping my reverie only to click on the next chapter every few minutes.
   If you've never heard Alexander Scourby's readings, this might be a good time to listen. You don't have to be religious, and you don't have to know about the real meaning of Easter. But you do need to be willing to lose yourself to that reassuring voice just for a few minutes. You never know where you might be transported.