Barbara Holdridge, who was co-founder of the first commercially successful record label with spoken word, one that started with the poet Dylan Thomas who recited his story ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ and that led to the current Multibillion-Dollar Audio Board industry, died on Monday in Baltimore, died. She was 95.
Her daughter, Eleanor Holdridge, confirmed death.
Mrs. Holdridge, together with her best friend, Marianne Mantell, built the label, Caedmon Records, in a dynamo of the recording -industry by remarkable authors and poets such as WH AUTEN, TS Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Wellora Welty, Willtora Weltyty their own words.
As the popularity of the recordings grew – the turnover in 1966 reached $ 14 million (about $ 141 million in today’s currency) – Caedmon plays and other literature works of famous actors started to record, including Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Richard Burton and Basil Rathon. The label also produced children’s stories such as “Babar” and “Winnie the Pooh”, using Boris Karloff, Carol Channing and other artists to read them.
But it was the Dylan Thomas album, with the resonant delivery of the poet, who brought the pediatric company on its way to success. Thomas, an eccentric, hard -drinking Welshe poet, was at the height of his fame when the record was released in 1952, and in the 1950s it was sold more than 400,000 copies, an unheard of amount for such a literary rate. A little over a year later he died of pneumonia at the age of 39.
“If we had started with some of the beautiful poets we later recorded, such as Katherine Anne Porter, Archibald Macleish, Ezra Pound and Faulkner, I don’t think it would have given someone so much,” said Mrs. Holdridge Inside 2014 in an interview with WNYC Radio In New York. “Students would have. Literature professors would have. But the Dylan Thomas -recordings, and with the money that came from the sale of those recordings, we could go further and record the authors we admired.”
The label was aimed at presenting literature as it originated – Mrs. Holdridge explained in the spoken word. She and Mrs. Mantell called the company Caedmon in honor of The seventh-century Koeherder considered the earliest known English poet.
Although there had been attempts before Caedmon’s attempts, the two women, who had scraped $ 1500 to start the company, provided a wide audience for authors for reading their own words.
“They were very looking ahead,” said Matthew Barton, the recorded sound curator for the Library of Congress, last year in an interview for this death notice. “If you entered a record store in 1952 and heard Dylan Thomas read ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’, you would say,” I want that, “and your wallet comes out. It showed how well they understood the potential of the medium in this way.”
The Library of Congress added the album to its national recording register in 2008 and noted that “it is credited for launching the audio book industry in the United States.” By 2023, the Audiobook market had achieved nearly $ 7 billion in global turnover and reached an estimated 140 million listeners.
Under Mrs. Holdridge and Mrs. Mantell, Caedmon earned dozens of Grammy nominations and became the gold standard for recordings of spoken words.
The Caedmon story is made more remarkable by the fact that Mrs. Holdridge and Mrs. Mantell-Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney Didtijds, the 22-year-old recently graduates from Hunter College in Manhattan were when they started their label. Both had diplomas in the humanities, and neither had some business experience. In an era in which women were expected to be housewives or teachers, Mrs. Holdridge, who worked as an assistant editor for a publisher of New York, and Mrs. Mantell, who wrote Label Copie for a record company, ambitious, determined and bored.
During lunch they complained one day when they worked for bosses “who were much steamer than we were,” Mrs. Holdridge remembered in the WNYC interview. She suggested that they would go to a lecture that Thomas gave that night in the 92nd Street Y. Mrs. Mantell then made a further suggestion: “Let’s take him up.” They had already discussed the idea to record authors who read their own works.
After reading, they sent a note to Thomas asking if he would consider participating with them in a recording project. They signed the note “B. Cohen and M. Roney”, so he would not know that they were women. His manager intercepted the note and sent them an answer, and suggested that they call Thomas in the Chelsea Hotel, where he lived at that time.
After several failed attempts to reach him, Mrs. Holdridge tried one morning at 5 o’clock to call, for the chance that he might just stumble home after a night of drinking hard. He grabbed the phone. Yes, he said, he would meet the women to discuss their idea.
To their surprise, he actually showed up at the agreed hour and brought his wife, the writer, Caitlin Thomas. During a noisy lunch he agreed to take the recording for an advance of $ 500, plus royalties.
“He even wrote down a number of poems that he wanted to record,” Mrs. Holdridge remembered. “Bringing him to the recording studio, however, was something else.”
After a no-show, Thomas finally arrived in Steinway Hall, a studio on West 57th Street, and recorded a series of poems, including his masterpiece “Do not go soft in that good night.” When they still had not enough material to fill both sides of a 33⅓ LP, the women asked if he had something else to record, and he remembered a story he had published in Harper’s Bazaar called “The Christmas of a child in Wales,” A nostalgic memory from the point of view of a young boy. He recorded it as the B-side of the album, and it was that story that the album was up to best seller.
The women started contacting other famous writers, both male and female, and asked them to come to the studio to record their words. And many did that.
Barbara Ann Cohen was born in New York City on July 26, 1929 to Herbert Lawrence Cohen, a representative of textile sales, and Bertha (Gold) Cohen, who supervised the household.
Barbara was an avid reader as a child and studied Greek. She also developed a lifelong love for gardening, starting by making small gardens with twigs and acorns in her apartment valve.
She married Lawrence Holdridge in 1959, a hydraulic engineer. He died in 1998. In addition to her daughter Eleanor, she was survived by another daughter, Diana Holdridge, and two grandchildren. Mrs. Mantell died in 2023 on 93.
Mrs. Holdridge and Mrs. Mantell sold Caedmon to Raytheon in 1970, and it was later taken over by Harper Collins, where the Caedmon print of Harperaudio still exists.
In 2001, Mrs. Holdridge was admitted to the National Women’s Hall of Fame, who praised her to create a wide audience for “various, high -quality literature” and demonstrating the meaning of spoken word recordings. “The Caedmon catalog is extraordinary for the dramatic gender equality and cultural inclusiveness it has achieved,” says the Hall of Fame website. “It expanded the audience for writing American women and writing women in general.”
After selling Caedmon, Mrs. Holdridge and her husband bought the 18th-century Voter house In Owings Mills, Md., And she created Voter House PublishersThose children’s books and source books set out for designers and artists. There she leaned to another of her passions and developed a 40 -hectare garden on the site. She also taught in publishing and writing books at Loyola University Maryland.
Mrs. Holdridge explained her ambitions for Caedmon and told NPR in 2002: “We did not want to do a collection of great voices or important literary voices. We wanted them to read as if they were recreating the moment of inspiration. They did exactly that. They read with a feeling, an inspiration that came through.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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