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Transcription: [00:00:00]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm)"}
You wanna get a level of my voice?
[00:00:05]

{SPEAKER name="Polly Stewart (interviewer)"}
Yeah. It sounds uh--
[00:00:09]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
Testing testing, one two. Competing with the air traffic from national airport. And are you picking it up all right?

[00:00:18]
{SPEAKER name="Polly Stewart (interviewer)"}
Yeah. It's um, it sounds kinda--sibilant!

[00:00:29]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
Sibilant! But you got a windscreen over the speaker so the microphone so it shouldn't be too sibilant.
[00:00:36]

{SPEAKER name="Polly Stewart (interviewer)"}
Well--somehow it's -- well, I'm just gonna assume that this is the best I can do.

[00:00:50]
This is tape 1 side 1 of an interview of Tom Vennumm by Polly Stewart on June 28th, 1996 at the Smithsonian Memories Tent of the 1996 Festival of American Folk Life. OK, enough of that!

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
OK.
[00:01:12]

{SPEAKER name="Polly Stewart (interviewer)"}
This is really open-ended, but I'm just gonna ask you the kind of general questions and see where it goes.
[00:01:23]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
OK.

{SPEAKER name="Polly Stewart (interviewer)"}
I think you have been associated with the Smithsonian for quite some time.
[00:01:30]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
Yes. I arrived at the Smithsonian in 1975 specifically to help Ralph Rinzler with the ethnomusicological aspects that were being brought into play for the selection of participants in the huge '76 bicentennial festival, and I've never regretted the move.
[00:01:56]
I had just finished my doctoral dissertation at Harvard and
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