I hope this does not upset anyone's apple cart, and I have stated this
on here previously; but again:

It is certainly plausible that there IS somewhere out there, somehow,
a recording of MT's voice, still extant.  We simply do not know of
one.  Remember the partial manuscript of Huck Finn, found in an old
trunk up in the attic??

There is that famous recording at Yale, the one that most scholars
agree is William Gillette's (I believe this is the correct name, but I
am not double checking this at the moment) rendition of MT.  Problem
is, there is also some slight possibility, as far as I can remember,
that the voice is in fact MT's voice.  There is no way to prove it
either way, and somewhere in my files I have a copy of a letter from
the Yale curator stating this to be the case.  In other words, it is
possible that the voice on the tape at Yale is in fact MT!  HA!  In
any event, we can rest assure that the tape tells us at least what he
did sound like.

In the future, can we rely upon Darrell Hammond's dead-on mimicry of
Bill Clinton on SNL to tell us what Clinton sounded like (assuming all
recordings of Clinton are somehow lost)?  The answer is, well, yes,
sort of....  and I argue here that we also know, sort of, what MT
might have sounded like (besides the many fine eyewitness accounts,
etc.)

--

Harold K. Bush, Ph.D
Saint Louis University
St. Louis, MO