Full Transcript:
Ray:
I just started doing it a couple of hours a week, and then the people of the station graciously said, well you can have some more time off to go do that. So I managed to get in two or three sessions a week and now I’m able to go every day pretty much and it’s been forever.
Pete:
The voice is so familiar.
Ray:
The big change has been in the recording process. We used to be recording on pure audio tape and now we’re recording a digital file.
Pete:
We’ve listened for so many years, decades, with so many changes.
Ray:
I pretty much always cold read. That’s my dirty little secret.
Pete:
And so many different genres.
Ray:
It was an erotic novel, written in first person by Belinda.
Pete:
Up close and personal.
Ray (reading):
Introducing Belinda. Well, first off, this is no sob story about mother. I am not ready to lie down on a shrink’s couch and say this was…
Ray:
I’m doing an entire book as a woman in an erotic novel. That was weird.
Pete:
Doing what comes so naturally.
Ray:
I know a lot of people who would not step into the studio and start recording even the first page without having read the whole book in advance. I’m not that guy.
Pete:
And now please join Jeff Thompson and me and our guest Ray Foushee.
Ray:
That’s my dirty little secret.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson.
Pete:
And I’m Pete Lane. Our guest today is Ray Foushee. Ray is most commonly known to all of us as a talking book narrator for the American Printing House. Ray has read more than 1000 books since 1983 when he started reading and is currently retired. Ray’s voice will be very familiar to all of us. How are you doing this morning, Ray?
Ray:
I am doing fine. How about you?
Pete:
I’m just wonderful. When did you retire exactly?
Ray:
I retired on January 12th, 2018. It’s only famous with me, but I just passed my four year anniversary and it seems like it was more like about four months. It really goes by fast. I can warn anybody out there who’s rapidly approaching retirement, is that your years really start flying by after that happens.
Pete:
Absolutely, they do. I’ve been retired since 2015 and time has literally flown.
Ray:
Yes.
Pete:
So Jeffrey, how are you doing today?
Jeff:
Well, time goes by when you’re having fun. So Ray, you must have enjoyed it.
Ray:
I’ve been enjoying retirement greatly. One of the big reasons is that it really allows me a little bit
more time and flexibility to do more of my recording, which I did not retire from and I really get a kick out of doing.
Jeff:
What got you interested and started in reading audiobooks?
Ray:
It’s really funny. It was a completely random occurrence that had me meeting the guy who introduced me to it. Where I worked for 40 years was WDRV TV, which is the Fox affiliate here in Louisville Kentucky where I lived all my life. I was an announcer, I was also a copywriter. This is back 40 years ago, so I was actually a young man then, and I would prepare a copy for an older gentleman who just freelanced for the station, but he’d come in on Fridays and record our weekend copy that would air over our movies and things like that. His name is Jerry Fordyce, Jerry Fordyce, as it turns out, had been and was still at that time a narrator for the American Printing House for the Blind, which is where I
record my books. I happened to be talking with him one day and he made mention of, well, I hope I can
get out of here soon enough because I have a reading session at the Printing House for the Blind. Well, I’ve never heard of the Printing House for the Blind. And I thought, reading session, what is it that you do? And so I asked him what is that you do? And he told me, oh, I’ve been doing this for years, I record books for the blind and it’s just a few miles from here. I thought that’s an interesting thing to find out about. And then he said, well, I pick up a few extra dollars along the way, it’s not a whole lot. Extra dollars, I’m a young guy, I’ve got a little daughter on the way, I thought extra dollars! And he’s right, you don’t get rich. I said, tell me more about this. And he told me and I had been doing some announcing at the station anyway and I thought, you know, I had some vocal chops. It actually worked out. They sent my tapes to the Library of Congress. They said yeah, fine. And so I just started doing it a couple of hours a week. And then the people of the station graciously said, well, you can have some more time off to go do that. So I managed to get in two or three sessions a week and now I’m able to go every day pretty much during the week, and it’s been forever. But that’s how I found out about it and that’s how I got into it.
Pete:
And that was in 1983, 1982. Somewhere thereabouts?
Ray:
I’m thinking ’82, late ‘82 I believe. I remember the first book. It was a western, of which I have done many since then. The title was Sam Bass. I’ll never forget that. That was my first book. But since then, there have now been over 1000 that I’ve done.
Pete:
No kidding. That’s great. So was that cassette tape days or was that still flexible disk?
Ray:
That was cassette days. As far as what we were recording on, of course we weren’t recording on cassette, it was big reel-to-reels. Yeah, the final product was cassettes, because I remember the closing announcements on each side would be end of sides that turned the cassette over and switch, yeah, the consumers were definitely listening to cassettes,
Pete:
For sure.
Ray (reading):
Line seven one zero. The Motive. A Dismas Hardy mystery by John Lescroart. Read by Ray Foushee, Library of Congress annotation. Former homicide cop [unintelligible] Hardy’s high school girlfriend, strong language and some violence.
Pete:
I have to tell you, Ray, I am in the midst of John Lescroart.
Ray:
Ah! One of my favorites.
Pete:
Definitely one of mine. I have an affinity for legal fiction. I read one of his first books, I said, this is
definitely up my alley.
Ray:
Yeah, they’re fun. I got to meet him.
Pete:
Did you really?
Ray:
Out In Los Angeles, I was invited out there by a group to get an award. They had other guests. One was Lindsay Wagner. Apparently she was a big benefactor of theirs. They invited a narrator. They had an author and it happened to be Lescroart.
Pete:
How about that?
Ray:
That that was fun, at that time, that was back in 2009. I was actually in the middle of doing a lot of his books. We got along really well.
Pete:
Yeah, he’s got quite a few of them in the Dismas Hardy series.
Ray:
Yeah, they’re fun.
Pete:
They really are.
Ray:
Did you know Dismas Hardy is the nephew of the Hardy Boys?
Pete:
I did not.
Ray:
Yeah, well I was talking to him about this and one of the books Dismas is reflecting back on his youth and he’s thinking about mother, his parents in general and his father’s name is Joe, okay, big deal. But then he mentioned his mother and just one time calls her by name and her name is Iola. And the old Hardy Boys books, Joe Hardy’s girlfriend was Iola Morton, and I thought this can’t be a coincidence. And I asked him about that, and he said that’s great, you picked up on that. There’s very few people do that.
Pete:
That’s cool.
Ray:
He’s actually, he’s Frank Hardy’s nephew and Joe Hardy’s son, which makes the Dismas Hardy books a whole lot more fun to me because I grew up reading the Hardy Boys. That was really cool.
Jeff:
Wow. What a connection. Have you ever done any Clive Cussler?
Ray:
I have done- I know I did one that was a while back. I couldn’t begin to tell you what the title was. It’s amazing how the titles of these books, well, I’ve done over 1000 now, a lot of times, they just disappear into the mist. And especially if it’s a really forgettable book in the first place. And now things have changed a whole lot because up until about two years ago we were recording things that actually, you know, were recorded on audiotape and we recorded them in sides. You know, there would actually be a side of a tape, it was 90 minutes long. And when you were finished, you began the next side and you reintroduced the book. You do the introduction of side two, such and such, so and so, by such and such, so and so, continuing on page 72 or whatever.
Ray (reading):
Produced by Robert B. Parker, copyright 1992 by Robert B. Parker, narrated by Ray Foushee. This book contains 224 pages on five sides.
Ray:
But now that we do things digitally, we actually still do record in 90 minute hunks. But that’s just for
the convenience. You don’t want to get 10 hours into a book and then have a corrupted file that blows the whole book and you have to go back and fix it. This way, it breaks it down into separate files and makes the possibility of mayhem a whole lot less. But anyway, I find now in the last couple of years, unless it’s a book that I really, really liked and paid attention to, I may completely forget even while I’m doing the book what the title of it is because I say it once, that’s it until the end of the book. Whereas before, if it was a 12 sided book, I would have said that name so many times it’s burned into my
brain. So it’s funny, you know, how I can completely remember a book and have no idea, no recollection at all what the title was.
Jeff:
I find that with editing when I do something where I have a few speakers and I edit it all the way through. Then I get the transcript and I can almost pinpoint exactly where it is in the 45 minutes to
an hour post because I’ve lived it so many times.
Ray:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Burned it into my brain like you said.
Ray:
Back and forth, back and forth, sure, it’s going to be there forever.
Pete:
You’ve obviously seen quite a bit of technology over the years. How has it changed from that point in time? The early 80s until now, for example, what do you use for technology? Do you still read a hard print book by the way?
Ray:
I do not. But that’s a very recent occurrence. I now read off of a computer screen. It’s an ebook, but that just started maybe about two years ago at most, at least at the Printing House. I’m sure maybe other places introduced the technology a little bit earlier, I’m not sure. But up until then I was working with the actual printed books. But the big change has been in the recording process which of course I don’t touch, I’m just talking into a microphone. But what I’m talking into and where it’s going is very different because we used to be recording on pure audio tape and now we’re recording a digital file. You would think it wouldn’t make much difference to me. But boy does it when you’re talking about doing corrections or just trying to go back and find something, because everything in a digital file, if somebody’s noted the correction, they note the precise point where it is. In the old days when you’re doing corrections, you had to go whizzing through a 90 minute tape and just kind of approximate where you’re gonna find it, go back and forth and back and forth. And then the cut-in process, if you have to replace the sentence, I can just record that sentence and it can be dropped in and replaced, you know, digital magic. Whereas before we actually had to find that spot and then I had to cut in at exactly the right spot, do my correction. You know, if it was a seven seconds long sentence, then I would have to make sure my sentence was exactly the same replacing it. I no longer have to worry about any of that. And that whole process, much smoother. The quality is much better too.
Jeff:
Ray, what are your favorite genres? And was there any genre that just made you cringe?
Ray:
I can give you the best example of the latter. Early on, this would have been at least certainly in my first three or four years. For some reason, I was assigned a book by Anne Rice. And this was before Anne Rice was Anne Rice. I mean I get this book and I have no idea who this Anne Rice is and I don’t think anybody else would have either. It was prior to her really hitting it big, but it was a book called Belinda, was the title of it. I’ll never forget this. And it was an erotic novel written in first person by Belinda, the title character, that was weird. The whole thing, you know, I’m doing an entire book as a woman in an erotic novel.
Ray (reading):
A novel, copyright 1986 by Anne Rice writing as Anne Rampling. Narrated by Ray Foushee. Annotation. Chronicles the sexual obsession of a middle-aged author. He is captivated by a 16-year-old runaway. Strong language and explicit descriptions of sex. 1986. Introducing Belinda. Well, first off, this is no sob story about mother. I am not ready to lie down on a shrink’s couch and say this was all…
Ray:
To this day, I cringe at the thought of going back and listening to it. But at the same time, I think I’d love to go back and listen to it just to find out how ridiculously stupid that was. That made me kind of cringe. But I think it also proved to the people at the Printing House that I was versatile, that I would do
anything because if I do that, I guess I’d do anything. So that’s been lucky. I’ve generally always had a book assigned to me as opposed to them waiting around saying, well, we haven’t found quite the right book for you to do, so you can take the week off or whatever. They usually find the right book for me to do because I can do a whole lot of different ones. But as far as my favorite, man, do I love hard-boiled crime stories. I think they’re really, really fun to do. I really like true crime stories. Those are pretty fascinating. I got to do, for instance, Helter Skelter, which is a fine, fine book.
Pete:
Helter Skelter is a good book.
Ray:
I’d read it myself many years ago, long before I became a narrator. So I was ready to go with that one. But I do a wide array and I tend to enjoy pretty much any of the things that- just reading of The Green Mile, which I think [unintelligible] enjoyed-
Pete:
The Green Mile. So you know, with Stephen King you’ve got to strapon your boots because you know, you’re in for the long haul, because his books are long aren’t they?
Ray:
They definitely are. Although that’s not tremendously long at least not by Stephen King standards. It was released originally when it was published as a series of paperback books. He wanted to emulate what Charles Dickens had done with his stories.
Pete:
Six parts, wasn’t it?
Ray:
It was six parts and then it came out monthly in paperback. But that that was the original and I just followed those up eagerly as they came out because like I said, I was already a Stephen King fan, whether I was narrating his stuff or not, I just thought that was really good. Those are very tiny paperbacks there, about 90 pages long. Six of those. That’s not a really long-
Pete:
Not for Stephen King.
Ray:
You can go a lot longer.
Pete:
That’s true. I read The Stand three times and that’s 1000, or 1100.
Ray:
Right, and there’s a longer version of it, I think. If I’m not mistaken when it first came out, it was maybe 1100. And since then they’ve released an unabridged copy that he was the one who did the abridging on in the first place.
Pete:
I know we touched on this a bit earlier, Ray, but you have not done any commercial audiobook reading, all of your reading has been for APH?
Ray:
That’s correct. I haven’t done any Audible or any stuff like that.
Pete:
Have you been tempted?
Ray:
Well, not really. Although I would be if I suddenly couldn’t do work for APH anymore, because I want to
continue doing it. But I’m happy doing as much as I do and for what I do it for at APH, and I’m not looking to go anywhere else.
Pete:
Right.
Jeff:
So Ray, do you do a cold read or do you prep for like characters or a particular book?
Ray:
That’s my dirty little secret. Although I’ll share it. I pretty much always cold read. I don’t do a whole lot of read ahead. I mean I will on some things that obviously require, you know, some familiarity with what’s going to be a very convoluted story or whatever like that. But so many books, as I said before about the legal thrillers and hard-boiled crime stories, they follow such a pattern that you can go cold and pretty well know where things are going. I know a lot of people who you know, would not step into the studio and start recording even the first page without having read the whole book in advance. And I’m not that guy. I think maybe it began as being simply lazy, but it’s really developed almost for me into a deliberate strategy, because I have found on occasion when I have read a big segment of a book long before I go in and read it, I don’t think I read it as well, because I think a big part of the reading process and I’m not talking about the narrating process, I’m talking about the reading process. Anybody who’s just sitting down with a book and reading it is, they’re getting it for the first time, and that’s part of the way it goes. You don’t know, you don’t know as the reader what’s going to happen next. So it’s almost unfair for the narrator to kind of communicate that he does know what’s coming next, you know what I mean?
Jeff:
So if there’s a dialogue between a guy and a gal, do you change it up at all on the fly?
Ray:
I do, I do, but that’s one of the things that, you know, they definitely are looking for somebody who can do that, but not sound, you know, caricature-ish, [pitches voice up] because I don’t want to talk like this like a girl, [voice returns to normal register] but some people actually try to do that. I find it, you know, if it’s just a typical man-woman conversation it’s very simple for me to be the man like this [pitches voice up slightly] and for the woman to speak a little bit like this [returns to normal register] in an upper register. That’s still my voice, if I just use this upper register all day I don’t think people would think I was trying to imitate a woman, but compared to my voice down here, which is my normal voice, then it’s a man-woman. I think that conveys the difference right there.
Pete:
Ray, what baffles me is how well you do different male voices. You might have a conversation with two females and three males, to use Dismas Hardy for example, you do a distinctively identifiable voice for Dis Hardy, which is differentiable from Abe Glitsky-
Ray:
[pitches voice down] Abe’s got a deep voice like this. I’ll give it a little bit of difference in registers there too, Dismas versus Abe is Dismas being me and Abe not being a little higher register, [pitches voice down] but a little lower register like that.
Pete:
So how do you know which one to use without even having read the dialogue?
Ray:
Well, that’s- well, in the case of like Dismas and Abe, all I had to do was read the very first chapter of the very first book and I knew who they were and I could file that away. Now you do bring up an interesting thing. When I do encounter characters for the very first time, I will very often do the dialogue for the first page or two and then realize wait, wait, this isn’t working. I don’t have them right. And we’ll go back and start again. That’s okay. But it usually doesn’t take much longer than that to do it. I mean now here’s the thing that does screw you up. And I’d invite your input on this too because we talk about this all the time. In a book, let’s say there’s a very suspenseful moment and a character is awakened by the phone ringing. He picks up the phone and the book goes, a voice on the other end said hello, I saw you and I will get you, click. The end of the chapter. We’re gonna move on to the next
thing now. Am I supposed to give away who that voice is? Because later in the book it may turn out to be one of the male characters. It may turn out to be one of the female characters, but the reader as they get to that spot, they don’t know, they’re not supposed to know yet.
Jeff:
It was the Butler!
Ray:
I have to give it a voice. So the only thing I can do there is give it the most neutral voice. I can almost do-
Pete:
Generic.
Ray:
But it’s still going to be either male or female. But I try not to do anything to give it a deep voice or a high voice or anything like that.
Jeff:
And that’s all split second thinking, just-
Ray:
Yes. Yeah. At that point, when you realize there’s going to be nothing here that’s going to identify who this is. And the whole point of this plot twist is that you’re not supposed to know, that’s going to be part of the mystery. It’s a weird thing that most people when they’re just reading a book would never think about twice.
Pete:
True, because it’s in their mind, right? Although I think as readers we also try to assign a voice or some sort of an identity in some way to characters and I don’t know why it would be much different in that situation.
Ray:
Exactly, that’s all true. And, you know, when I am doing any kind of a novel, immediately, you can count on the fact that the main male character, the main male protagonist is going to be me, it’s going to be my natural voice because that’s who I’m going to be most of the time, so that’s comfortable. And we work from there. Women get a little bit higher register, guys from Brooklyn, get a little bit of this, you know, you don’t want to do a broad thing, but you want to be a little bit less formal. You know, maybe give it the nose. Gravelly voices are really easier to do too. They say gravelly, it’s, and you know, it works.
Jeff:
You know, Ray, I’ve known a lot of listeners who like following authors, they like following series, but some of them follow, they follow Ray, they like how they read books. So they look at the narrator.
Ray:
Right, I’ve met people like that who told me they look for mine. I don’t think I’m the only one they look for. But yeah, they have their favorites and that’s who they want to hear and it really is secondary what we’re reading, which is a really nice thing to think about. I mean, it’s quite a compliment, but I don’t think it’s unusual.
Pete:
I think on that way, to a great extent, I think the narrator, the reader can make or break the story. In fact, I’ve picked up a book, the ones we’ve been constantly talking about, and I apologize to the audience for harping on this one author. But if it’s not a Ray Foushee reading it or perhaps another reader, but if it’s certain readers, I will set it aside and I love this series.
Ray:
I’m the guy who’s reading them into the microphones. I rarely hear any of the books by my colleague or myself for that matter once they’re done. So, you know, I’ve got a lot of people that I narrate with, you know, I know them well, speak to them every day, I know what their voices sound like, but I don’t know what their voices sound like in a recording, and that can be different, I think, you know, I just know that I’ve heard from many, many people who say oh, I love this particular narrator and I’ll listen to anything he or she does. I’ve heard people say that about me too. It’s kind of fun to be recognized that way.
Pete:
How are you assigned books? For instance, you read this John Lescroart series. Do you always get
those when they come up or do they assign them to other readers?
Ray:
I haven’t gotten a Lescroart in a long time. First of all, the Library of Congress, National Library Service, which is a part of the Library of Congress, they’re the ones who decide which books are going to be sent to which recording houses. And there are only a few recording houses they deal with in the nation. But in any case, that’s the first step is that their committee picks books that they want to have
recorded. They send the shipment on a regular weekly, biweekly basis to those houses, and then it’s up to the recording houses to assign the books based on who they have available and who they think, you know, you can do things. Generally there’s always an attempt if the books come through and there’s a follow-up in a series and you’ve done earlier books in this series, you’ll get it, that’s pretty much the case, unless you did the first book in the series, and nobody thought you did a good job, in which case that’s not going to be the case, But if you’re really associated with a series book, you’re going to get it. But as far as how they assign things that aren’t series books, which is the vast majority of them, it’s
just the question of our studio head and she does a great job, basically, assigning the books based on her perceptions of how it’s gonna go. She scans the books, figures out what the genre is and figures out what this is going to take, certain things are going to make a book a woman’s book or a man’s book, except in the case of that crazy Anne Rice book.
Ray (reading):
Well, first off, this is no sob story about mother. I am not ready to lie down on a shrink’s couch and say this was all bad.
Ray:
Normally there are certain standards, but that was years and years ago. If there’s a nonfiction book for
instance, I did one recently. It was called An American Hero. It’s a very good book by the way. It was a book that was about a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, had an incredible military career before that and after that, an amazing tale. I got that book and I think I’ll get a book like that for many reasons. I do a lot of American history books, so I’m pretty good on places, history like Vietnam. I’m old enough to remember Vietnam and more naturally pronounce Vietnamese place names because they were commonplace in the news back then. Whereas, you know, there might be another nonfiction book that deals with a different subject that possibly I wouldn’t necessarily be connected with and then she’ll find somebody else who would do a better job on that. But that’s it. And westerns, like I say, hard-boiled crime, it’s almost an automatic that goes into my pocket.
Pete:
I would imagine commercial recordings also change what you’re handed. With so much more, now, coming down the line and commercially recorded.
Ray:
Absolutely. What it does is it reduces what we’re handed, we don’t do nearly as many books at the Printing House now as we did 40 years ago when I started there, because 40 years ago there was no commercial book market, 20 years ago there was and you saw a difference then. But even then there was a definite difference in the product because virtually all commercial books were so heavily abridged that you had people split into camps, you have the people who that was okay with them and then you had the diehards, who, no, they weren’t gonna listen to an abridged product, they wanted to hear every word. But now there’s a whole lot of audio on the market that isn’t abridged and it’s a real competition there. You just naturally don’t necessarily get as many books as you did. On the other hand, though, we always have done books that are also available on the shelves as a commercial book, Green Mile would be one of them. You can go to any, you know, good bookstore that handles audio books and I’m sure you could find an unabridged reading of The Green Mile and it won’t be me. But it’s a definitely different thing. There are fewer narrators now. It’s like so many other endeavors in America today. It’s smaller. We’ve had to adapt. We don’t have as much business but the ones of us who are still there probably read as much as we would have in the old system. It’s just there have been a whole lot more readers to do a whole lot more product.
Pete:
Do you listen to audiobooks yourself when you read? I have only listened to one audio book in my life from beginning to end and that was a recording of Dracula. A book I read when I was maybe 13 years old and fell in love with. I do like to listen to podcasts, you know, laying in bed at night especially, I’m used to the idea of wanting to listen to voices but books themselves, no, but I found out about the existence of this Dracula that was out there so I made an attempt to do that, and I found it to be a very pleasant experience.
Jeff:
Ray, with the technology that is out today we’re starting to hear some artificial intelligence voice engines reading books and reading texts and stuff like that, and I see it in audio description on tv shows. How do you view that? I know you said there’s not as much opportunity but are there younger people getting involved as well?
Ray:
Yes. Yes. We have several younger people at the Printing House who are doing some work. Of course to me now, everybody’s a younger person. But- I’m realizing now some of the examples I was going to tell you about that, I thought no, she’s 50. But no, there are some very young people who are there. Not many, not many at all. But they’re doing it. You mentioned the automated voices, the artificial intelligence voices. I haven’t had hardly any experience listening to those, but I can’t imagine that they’d be tolerable to me. And I find that readers that I hear from, people who do contact me and like to talk about the books I do, they are adamantly against. Hey, there is a large cadre of readers out there who want nothing to do with the artificial voice, and unless it’s a lot better than I imagine it is, I would have to agree. I can’t imagine thinking an artificial voice is going to be better than a human voice.
Jeff:
Well, I listen to voiceover all the time and I cannot listen to an entire book. I can go in the barn or I can go on to certain things and listen to voiceover reading something. But it’s usually more of an educational thing. I want some information, I gather that information. But if I want to sit down and settle into a book and get lost in that world that’s being read to me, I want a human voice, you know,
Inflection, just, it’s all there.
Ray:
Sure. I won’t say that I, I don’t think an artificial voice could capture all of that because if I said that about every technology ever came along, I’d look like the most foolish person in the world, because sooner or later everybody does get it right. And boy, you can’t believe that artificial intelligence does this. But right now, I would have to be convinced. And I don’t think the technology is certainly there at all. There’s such a wide range of inflection, some of which may be unique. You know, seriously, you may give a word a certain inflection that has never been done before. It’s very possible when you’re just a human being reading a word, artificial intelligence by its very nature can’t do that.
Pete:
Well, that’s a pretty open-minded thinking. And I would agree with you because just looking at the
quality of the digital voices today versus even five, ten years ago, it’s phenomenal, the difference, and
where we’ll be in a year or two, it may have an appeal to us that we just can’t even fathom at this point until-
Ray:
Well, that’s right. It really isn’t related, but at the same time it is, I mean when I was a kid, what did we think was the most expensive-looking, perfect, beautiful television picture you could imagine? You know somebody got the most expensive set, biggest screen you could get. It was a black and white picture of lines across the screen that looks totally primitive now next to what we have now. But then to our eyes it looked perfect and we were amazed.
Jeff:
19 inches.
Ray:
Sure! A 19 inch- you know if you paid, say, 7, 800 dollars for a tv back then, boy, you were getting the very best thing you could get. And I am sure, to the eyes of 1955, 1957, these people were as dazzled as, you know, you are now when you walk into Costco and see their big 4K and ultraK screens there, you know, that- no comparison. But yet it looked like that to them then.
Ed Sullivan Show audio:
Ladies and gentlemen, tonight from New York, the Ed Sullivan Show.
Pete:
You know, yesterday was the 58th anniversary of the Beatles first appearance on Ed Sullivan,
Ray:
I knew it well.
Ed Sullivan Show audio:
Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles!
Pete:
Glued to a 17 inch tv. Might have even been black and white.
Ray:
You bet it was, it was black and white. Everything was black- well, not everything was in ’64, but the Ed Sullivan show sure was still.
Pete:
Yeah.
Jeff:
I also think, you know, what other picture was, it was awesome, when the astronauts landed on the moon, we didn’t complain about the microphone they used, it was information. You got it and it was just amazing.
Ray:
Now when you hear transmissions from outer space, these guys sound like they’re in the next room. There’s no difference in listening to that audio quality than it is listening to me sitting next to you. And the video! One of my hobbies is I like to go back through old newspaper archives and just kind of pick a random date and you know, just see what the newspaper looked like that day. Movie ads, tv schedules, what was going on in the news. Just the other day, I was looking at a story that- it was probably a week after the moon landing and it was written by the local tv writer at the time and the big headline was about the company that we can thank for the wonderfully sharp clear pictures we got from the moon. And I was thinking, boy, that was called a sharp clear picture. But it was, by our standards then! Time does march on, doesn’t it?
Pete:
That it does.
Jeff:
Other than the tape hiss from cassettes that we all endured, but we didn’t pay much attention
to it because when I was listening to the tapes, I was going to school, I was just taking information, so that didn’t particularly bother me at all. But nowadays with all the digital and the ease of being able to, like you said, edit or whatever you do with the audio tracks, today it matters a little bit more. I think people want to hear that good narrator, they want to hear, because we’ve been spoiled a little bit. The availability of it is all that, so I don’t want to see it go away.
Ray:
I agree. I know what you mean.
Jeff:
Is there a word that is a stumper for you to articulate?
Ray:
No one, but there are word combinations that will mess you up. Words that maybe end in an S C H sound but then begin with an S C H sound, the next word. That’d be an extreme example. But there are words like that where you almost have to stop after each word, even in a little three-word phrase, because you can’t move your mouth around that fast. You realize when you do say it out loud that if you’re doing it as dialogue in a book, that author in this instance does not have a good ear for
dialogue, because you realize you’re not the only person who can’t do this. You realize no humans ever say those three words together. You know, it’s just an epiphany you have. Now, if it’s as part of the straight narration of the author’s voice, that’s okay because when you write, you write the words you want, but you realize that nobody really talks this way. That’s a big difference between books I enjoy doing and books I don’t enjoy doing, because you never realize it when you’re just sitting looking at a book and reading it, you know, a sighted person, but that happens a whole lot. And some authors don’t have a talent at all for understanding how people talk. And so many of those examples will come up. But when you’re actually saying it out loud, you realize nobody ever says this and you have a book like that and you’re always kind of on guard whenever dialogue begins because you know, he’s gonna trip you up here. Whereas you have other authors and I’m not saying that they get simpler, but they have an ear for dialogue where it, you know, quotes when you get into a long conversation, everything everybody says floats very naturally off your tongue and you suddenly realize this guy knows how to write dialogue.
Jeff:
I notice it during editing if a word ends with an S, and starts with the S. And if someone’s minced a word and I want to correct it just to find the word a, like “a cat” or something like that. I’d be better off going to get cat and pulling it out of there because everyone always blends it right together with the next word or they tail off a word and blend it into the next word.
Ray:
Right, and that’s not necessarily wrong. You know, if it’s dialogue, I mean that’s the way you do it. A good example of a phrase like, I guess, “census statistics.”
Pete:
Do you ever do voice exercises to kind of loosen up the jaw or the tongue before you sit down to read?
Ray:
No, not really. It’s more important that I not do certain things. I tend to not want to read right after a meal. So I like to do my reading late morning. Generally my sessions are like from about 10:30 to 12:30. So it’s more like what I don’t want to do before I read as opposed to anything I do.
Jeff:
That’s exactly me. I’m a morning guy. I like before noon, I do a late night show every two weeks. It’s a different voice. My voice is all creamy, you know what I mean?
Ray:
Yeah, there’s a certain phlegm-y quality at certain times of the day, which isn’t necessarily negative, but it’s different than what you do most of the time. You know, it’s almost in the back of your throat. When we do corrections, many, many times, corrections will come around and I usually match perfectly. It’s amazing. It really is incredible to me that my voice will sound exactly the same as it did when I recorded the original maybe a month ago. But I will immediately recognize, oh yeah, this was the day I was reading in the afternoon. When I do the correction, I try to manufacture that quality in my voice to match that.
Jeff:
I did that a lot. If I recorded at night and I was editing in the morning, I cannot throw in my deep morning voice. I got to, like, step back for a second and think about it.
Ray:
You’re imitating yourself. Yes.
Pete:
Ray, I know you haven’t done any commercial recording, but what kind of advice you think of giving someone who wanted to get into the voiceover or audio describer or narrator/reader business? A young kid getting into that kind of a thing.
Ray:
Boy, that’s hard because I certainly just stumbled into the whole thing. When I tell you I worked at a TV station for 40 years, even that was an accident. I mean, I did not do anything in my education, I didn’t do anything in the first seven years of my employed life that had anything to do with using my voice
for anything at all. I was working for state government. The only thing I was doing was writing a freelance column for the local newspaper about old television and just suffice it to say that that led to one thing led to another thing led to another thing, wound up me getting a job as promotions manager, not as anything else at the tv station that I wound up staying with for the rest of my life. Once I’m there, they heard my voice, got me to do a few, you know, announcing strips, tags for commercials and stuff. I got to know my way around an audio booth and then I became the station announcer. In addition to what I was doing and wound up over the Printing House. What I would do would be to tell them if they can find anybody who does it, now I’m talking about commercial because I don’t think there’s going to be a huge long-term future for the reasons we’ve discussed before. I have a good friend of mine who does stuff for Audible, who is also a narrator at the Printing House. I’m sure she’d be a fount of information because she got the gig at the Printing House through me. I’m the one who recommended her, we worked together at the station. So somewhere between then and now she went and did the research and found out about it. Right now if I wanted to do that she’d be the first person I’d go to and say, hey, what did you do? How does this work out? But I don’t know. I really don’t
know.
Pete:
What about technique? Did your reading get better as you did more of it? Was practice something that helped make perfect, do you think? And would practicing help these young individuals prepare themselves for this business more easily?
Ray:
Yes, I think definitely there, but if you’re going to do anything for 40 years, you hope you get better.
Pete:
Good point.
Ray:
Seriously. I feel so much more natural when I sit down doing it. It’s just second nature to me now, and I was much more self-conscious about what I was doing and that’s the first thing, you know-
Jeff:
And Tom Brady quits after 22. Look at that.
Ray:
I don’t have 280lb linebackers crunching me every other day.
Jeff:
You know, listening to your voice two phrases came to mind that I thought you could knock out either The Shadow Knows or You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.
Ray:
The Shadow Knows, Lamont Cranston. You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.
Pete:
There you go.
Ray:
How was that?
Pete:
Do you put yourself in a celebrity’s mindset when crafting a voice for one of your characters?
Ray:
Yes, absolutely. That’s my go-to as far as an identity to hang a hat on. I pretty much cast all of my novels as I’m going, I don’t know, they just always become somebody and that’s what helps me do the voices when they come back after 20 pages and there’s this character shows up again. I remember usually they’re character actors or somebody that you know from TV shows, they are this person, that’s who I’m envisioning. So that makes it a lot easier to just keep a voice consistent because if I was attempting to actually sound like that person, I would always be consistent in how I did it. So I’m doing the same thing with the character and that’s who’s cast in the role. Same thing for the women, that’s how I keep women’s voices separate. You know, you have older women and younger women so that helps, you know, there’s one distinction right there, and then you have very refined women and you have a little harder-edged women. That’s another thing. You got something else going there. And so that all piles up. And at the end of the book you have everybody cast and the main guy is always me, I’m the star.
Jeff:
That’s really fun. It’s really fun listening to you talk about these characters and stuff.
Ray:
Sure, yeah. And there are so many things like that that you can do. You know, if you got this real sarcastic guy you can do a Phil Silvers type thing, you know. And though you may not change your voice to do it, the attitude that voice comes out in, that changes your voice.
Jeff:
And that’s what I think the listeners, I want to say readers, but the listeners enjoy so much, the way you approach it, those subtleties is enough. It doesn’t have to be over the top. It’s just that subtle shift. It’s a page-turner, keeps you going.
Ray:
That’s great. That is what they will tell you the first day you start doing this stuff is we’re not looking for caricatures and doing voices. You know, you’re doing characters, they will sound different because they are different characters, but don’t go over the top. And I think many of the people who were rejected, that’s the stumbling block, and I took it to heart. I didn’t know whether I was doing what they wanted, but apparently it worked because they took it. So I’ve just kind of gone with it since then and tried to think, okay, am I really doing something when I talk through my nose, just a little bit to imply
somebody else? Is that a caricature or is it just more of a hint? I guess I’m staying on the right side of that line, but it’s always a question.
Pete:
And I hear braille readers, for example, say that they prefer reading braille because it leaves the identity and the development of the character more to their imagination. It’s more of a blank slate.
Ray:
I can certainly understand that. I mean I, personally, I would much rather read a novel than see the movie it was based on, even if it’s a really well, well done movie and I think that’s the reason I feel that way. I get to cast the whole thing. So I understand that. I certainly do.
Jeff:
I like reading books, I like seeing movies. But when I get something that’s audio described, it’s a whole ‘nother genre in a sense. And then when I listen to ebooks and you’re listening to a synthetic voice, but when you’re reading a book, Ray, I’m listening to the narrator too. So that’s another area. I don’t crisscross the two together or compare or anything. I have access to it and I like it. It’s enjoyable. It’s almost, I don’t want to say go over the top theater. I mean you’re supposed to be unnoticeable, because I’m taking in a book, but you help keep me turning those pages because those subtleties, I’m not distracted.
Ray:
Okay, well that’s good. That’s when I’m doing my job correctly. But that’s the thing, you don’t want the narrator to be distracting, but that doesn’t mean you want them to be a cipher, because the artificial intelligence voice is a cipher and that is distracting. You’re constantly aware that this is not right. Whereas if you’ve got someone who does good inflections and good voices and everything, they do disappear into the work. I didn’t mean to say that I would never listen to a book if I could read it with my eyes because like I said earlier, the Dracula book that I did listen to, I enjoyed that immensely. But that brings up another benefit of the narrator style as opposed to just sitting and reading, which is that I listened to Dracula practically 98% in the dark, laying in bed. You know, you can’t read a book in the dark, laying in bed, you know, so it’s a whole different setting and it served its own purpose.
Pete:
What impresses me about you is in light of what we’ve been talking about, you don’t want to overdo the inflections or the dialect or whatever we’re talking about with the types of voices. You don’t want to go over the top. But yet just yesterday I read a conversation in a book with probably six characters talking in a group, three men, three women. And even with your subtlety, I could tell who was speaking without even knowing, you know, oftentimes the writer will say “Ray says,” they’ll identify who’s speaking up front, so you know who’s about to speak. But often there’s no identification of the character in the author’s text. So I know who’s speaking among these three women. I know it’s Ruth versus Betty versus Janice, and it baffles me how you can hit the ground running and be able to move into the specific character’s voice before the character’s line even comes up in the dialogue or the conversation.
Ray:
Well, that’s the thing any of us want to hear most, is that you can do that. That’s great. Thank you.
Pete:
Have you ever gotten negative feedback from listeners?
Ray:
No, I have to say no, but at the same time-
Pete:
Well it just so happens, Ray, I got a couple of things. No, I’m kidding.
Ray:
But when I say that, you know, the feedback that we get from listeners, there’s not a lot of it, there just really isn’t. And I think that listeners, if they don’t like your stuff, then they rightly don’t listen to it and move on. I’ve gotten a decent amount of feedback over the years, but it’s always been positive. But I think that’s because that’s what moves people to give you feedback. At least it was in the old days. I mean these days with social media and all that first reaction to anything is let’s trash him on Twitter or whatever, but it didn’t used to be that easy. You know, and most of the feedback I got was in the old days, you know, when it would actually be a letter or maybe even a phone call, somebody would call
the Printing House and leave a phone number and I’d call him and we’d talk. But you know, if they’re going to go to that kind of trouble, it’s probably because they liked it. If they didn’t, they’d move on to somebody else who they did like and they’d give them positive feedback.
Jeff:
I’m just glad you didn’t say pony express or a telegram.
Ray:
Not that, but actually I did send a telegram one time in my life.
Jeff:
And those listeners who don’t know what a telegram is, go study the morse code. Pay
attention.
Ray:
That’s exactly right.
Pete:
Ray, do you encourage your listeners to reach out to you and share their thoughts?
Ray:
I do, nothing ever pleased me more on a given day than to get to the Printing house, look in my mailbox and see that there was a letter.
Pete:
Sure. Do you want them to write to you email, or what?
Ray:
Email me directly, and I’ll give you my email, it’s rfoushee, and you spell that f-o-u-s-h-e-e, 41, at gmail.com.
Pete:
There you heard it, ladies and gentlemen.
Ray:
The 41 is in recognition of Channel 41 which was the dial number of the tv station I worked at
Pete:
WDRB.
Ray:
Right, right.
Pete:
Cool. Any association with the AFB?
Ray:
Oh, AFB, they used to award the Alexander Scourby Award, and I was fortunate enough to win that back in-
Pete:
1995.
Ray:
That’s right, 1995.
Pete:
For nonfiction
Ray:
For nonfiction, yes. Anybody who ever sends me to New York, I love. My wife and daughter were with me and we got to take in the whole thing. It was fun. That was a great time. It was really neat.
Pete:
What a great experience.
Jeff:
Ray, I really enjoyed listening to your passion. I didn’t know what it would be like because you know, you listen to a narrator read books and stuff like that, the way you go about it and all that stuff. I like it.
I like it a lot.
Pete:
I too enjoyed it, Ray.
Ray:
I like doing these interviews whenever I get a chance to do them, and it’s fun to do. You guys are very
good interviewers.
Pete:
It’s more of a chat, I think with us, it occurs naturally.
Ray:
Yeah, that’s what’s fun. Maybe that’s the best answer for how I read. I just try to go with what comes naturally. Yeah, that’s it.
Jeff:
One page after the other. Ray, thank you so much for taking the time to share your journey through it, and your passion.
Pete:
Absolutely
Ray:
Happy to do it always. Really. And if you ever want to do it again, let me know, I’m ready.
Pete:
The next time you retire from something else, we’ll hit you up.
Ray:
There you go. Although I’m running out of things to retire from.
Pete:
Well, don’t retire from reading talking books.
Ray:
My plan is to do that until I die, seriously. And I wouldn’t be the first to do that. I realized some of the people I listened to on the radio and watched on TV when I was a child, some of them went well into their 90s and continued to read there until literally they couldn’t read anymore. And that was it, something people do for their lives.
Pete:
I assume you knew Mitzi Friedlander?
Ray:
Oh, absolutely. Mitzi was a great person. She really, really was. She has a studio named after her now at the Printing House. Nice little plaque outside the studio that she usually always recorded in. And that’s the Mitzi Friedlander studio now.
Pete:
Do you have a favorite studio? A regular studio?
Ray:
I have a regular studio. Yes. So maybe one day we’ll have a plaque. Although right now a lot of people read in that studio too, so I have competition.
Pete:
Yeah, there you go. Well, Ray Foushee, thanks a million for chatting with us.
Ray:
You’re very welcome.
Jeff:
Thanks a lot, Ray.
Pete:
Enjoy retirement, sir. This concludes our chat with Ray Foushee. We want to thank Ray for joining us in the Blind Abilities studio. You can read more about Ray Foushee and his work with the American Printing House for the Blind on their website, www.aph.org. And of course listen to his selection of narrated titles from the National Library Service or on the Bard mobile app. And as usual, thanks to Chee Chau for his beautiful music. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great day.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff:
For more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities, download our app from the app store, Blind Abilities, that’s two words, or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com. Thanks for listening.
Contact Your State Services
If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Transition Coordinator Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.
Contact:
You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities
On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com
Send us an email
Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Storeand Google Play Store.
Give us a call and leave us some feedback at 612-367-6093 we would love to hear from you!
Check out the Blind Abilities Communityon Facebook, the Blind Abilities Page, and the Career Resources for the Blind and Visually Impaired group