Actually, I was looking for a nice rendition of “If We Must Die,” his most popularly recorded and recited poem. Most of the versions were not too good, and a surprising number contained errors of one kind or another: mispronunciation, switching of word order, substitution, or omission. One recording stood out above the rest and I kept returning to it. At first I didn’t realize it was McKay himself.
I’ve found three distinct audios: McKay talking about his most famous poem; a reading of three poems together (“If We Must Die”, “St. Isaac’s Church, Petrograd”, “The Tropics in New York”); and “If We Must Die” all by itself (I haven’t listened carefully enough to notice if this is an extraction from the reading of three and therefore the same audio).
Here is the introduction: