This month marks 48 years since the Beatles finished recording what would be their last album as a band, “Abbey Road.” Along with the album’s iconic cover, songs like “Come Together” and “Here Comes the Sun” are firmly etched into the memory of our collective culture and continue to transcend generations of new listeners.
However, during a recent listening session, News-Press storyteller Amy Bennett Williams says something that distinctively stood out to her was the ambient melody of crickets leading into the song “Sun King.” The album’s title refers to the Abbey Road Studios, then called EMI Studios, where the Beatles recorded almost all of their songs, but what type of crickets were used for that recording and where were they recorded?
An effort to answer those questions led Williams to a Florida entomologist who has worked to maintain a rather definitive audio collection of songs from all manner of cricket varieties, as she tells us in this week’s essay.
