When Dave Isay was a kid, he interviewed his grandmother and her sisters, and he got it on tape. His grandmother was a larger-than-life character. Both her parents had died in the 1918 flu epidemic, the girls were left orphans, and she was the one who raised her sisters. That was the woman on the tape. She died when he was fifteen. The sisters died as well. And at seventeen he went to find the tape, and it wasn't there.
He told Time magazine about it as a grown man, after about twenty years of making radio documentaries. Recording people was what he did for a living. And he said that whenever he's at his parents' house he still goes hunting for that tape. "I know that I'll never be able to find it," he said. What he did about it involves a train station, and we'll get there.
It leaves a question behind, though. What are you making when you record your grandmother, and is it worth the trouble?
We'll begin with what the people who do this for a living mean by an oral history, and where they got the idea. Then what happens to the stories a family hands down by talk alone, which somebody has measured. And then the first decision: whom to ask, and what to say to them.
Start with the name, which is a problem. The historian Linda Shopes once presided over the Oral History Association, and she calls oral history a "maddeningly imprecise" term. People use it for several different things, and two of them matter here. One is the informal talk about the old days that goes on in any family. The other is a recorded interview. Every family has some of the first. This course is about the second, and the recorder is the least of the difference.
The Association sets out its principles in ten paragraphs. I'm going to draw three marks out of them that make an interview an oral history, and number them, because we'll want them again. The choice of three is mine. Some of what I'm leaving out, consent above all, has a lecture to itself.
The first mark is that it's prepared for. The interviewer arrives having done some homework, with things to ask. The second mark is that it's shaped by the person telling it. The Association's word for that person is the narrator, and I'll use it from now on. You bring the questions, and the narrator decides what's worth saying. The third mark is that it's kept, so that other people can use it. That one is built into the definition, because the words oral history cover the interview and also the recording it leaves. So you are making two things: a conversation, and the object it leaves behind.
For all three marks in one family, go to Knoxville, Tennessee. The Smithsonian publishes a guide for people who want to interview their own families and neighbors, and one of its examples is a Mrs. Lewis, who was known as Mamoo. Mamoo was prized by family and friends for a soggy coconut cake. "Christmas is not Christmas without Mamoo's coconut cake," her granddaughter said. When Mamoo was ninety-five, the family decided to get it on the record. They turned up with a recorder, a camera and a great many questions, and they stayed with her through the whole operation, beginning with what the guide gravely calls "the selection of a suitable coconut". They got a good deal more than a recipe: the memories and the opinions that came with it. Afterward they typed up the tapes and printed a booklet of forty-three pages for relatives, friends and neighbors.
Hold the three marks against that. It was prepared for, since they came with questions and with one subject. Mamoo shaped it, since they were following her through something she knew and they didn't. And it was kept, at least as a booklet. The guide doesn't say what became of the tapes.
Then hold the same three against the tape Dave Isay made. On the first two he doesn't tell us. On the third there's no doubt: it wasn't kept. The conversation may have been worth having for its own sake, and Isay calls listening a gift. But I'd say the third mark is the one that undoes the others. An interview nobody can find has gone back to being an old story, for everyone who wasn't in the room.
An oral history, then, is an interview that is prepared for, shaped by the narrator, and kept so that others can use it.
Historians generally date the practice from Columbia University in 1948. Ordinary people had been interviewed before that. In the late 1930s the Federal Writers' Project sent out interviewers who wrote down thousands of life histories from people living through the Depression. But the people who began at Columbia were not thinking of your grandmother, or of anybody like her.
Allan Nevins was a journalist, a biographer and a professor of history, and since the 1930s he'd been worried about the telephone. Public men used to leave letters and diaries behind them. Now they picked up the phone, and a phone call leaves nothing. His remedy was to go and interview, in his phrase, "living Americans who have led significant lives". He began in May of 1948. The first interviews were taken down in notes; a wire recorder soon followed, and then tape. Six years on, the magazine American Heritage reported that his office had interviewed hundreds of important people. The results were filed in what one of his staff called a "deep-freeze of current American history".
What would you expect to find in a deep-freeze of history? Tapes, you'd think. Mostly it was paper. In those years the recording was only a step toward something else. Each interview was typed out word for word, and that typed version is called a transcript. The transcript was edited, sent to the narrator to correct, and presented as a memoir. And the tape, as a rule, was used again for the next interview.
One of the first narrators was Frances Perkins, the first woman to sit in an American cabinet. The office interviewed her over several years, in the first half of the 1950s. There were hundreds of hours of tape, and the transcript ran past 5,000 pages. Of all that sound the office kept two hours. Its habit was to keep a sample, to show what the voice was like. Two hours, as evidence that she had one.
So in the beginning an oral history was a typed document about a significant person. Neither half lasted.
Take the significant person. In the 1960s and 1970s the tape recorders went where the notebooks had been, to factory hands, to minorities, to women: people whose lives were typical of something and famous for nothing. That is the American story. In England, the oral history movement centered on working-class life.
And the typed document? There was a case for it. The narrator read the transcript and corrected it, and a transcript is quicker to read than a tape is to hear. But in 1961 an assistant director persuaded the office to keep every tape, and Columbia has come to call the recording the primary source. I'll call it the original: the recording itself, with the voice on it. Columbia still makes transcripts. It just no longer takes the copy for the thing.
Now the train station. One morning in October of 2003, a small crowd stood around a booth, eight feet by ten, in Grand Central Terminal in New York. The man they'd brought in to cut the ribbon was Studs Terkel, the oral historian, ninety-one years old and in from Chicago. Almost the first thing he said was that he was "deaf as a post" and hadn't caught a word. Then he said what the booth was for. "We shall begin celebrating the lives of the uncelebrated." Everybody knows the station had an architect, he said, but "who hung the iron?" And "who swept the floors?"
The booth was the first of a project called StoryCorps, and its founder was Dave Isay. What people said inside it was recorded, and a copy went to the Library of Congress: the third mark, built in. It meant, he told Time, that great-great-great-grandchildren could someday hear the voice. He told the story of his lost tape in the same breath. I'll leave the connection where he left it.
I'm not offering the booth as the profession's verdict. At their own annual meeting, oral historians have argued over whether what goes on inside it is oral history at all. I offer it as a measure of distance. The practice set out after significant lives and typed pages. By 2003 it had come to a booth in a train station, open to anybody's grandmother, with her voice as the original.
So we have the thing itself, with its three marks, and we've seen how long it took to reach her. What we don't have yet is a reason. Families talk. Why wouldn't the stories keep on their own?
Somebody has measured how well they keep. The work was done in Belgium by Aline Cordonnier and three colleagues, about seventy-five years after the Second World War. They found twenty French-speaking families in which someone had resisted the German occupation. They expected such families to be the strong test. If any family stories were going to last, it would be these.
They interviewed three generations of these families, one person at a time. The oldest were in their eighties and nineties, and remembered the war. In most of the families, though, the resister was already dead, so the oldest person was usually the resister's child, telling a parent's story. Then came one of that person's children, and one of the grandchildren, most of them grown. Each was asked for one story about the resister and the resistance. Then the two younger ones were given a hint toward the story the oldest had picked, to see whether they knew it.
Before I tell you how the grandchildren did, guess. A family with a war record to be proud of. A story the oldest chose as the one to tell. How many of the grandchildren knew it?
The middle generation did well. All but one of them knew the story. The grandchildren were another matter. Nearly half didn't know it at all, even with the hint. Most of the rest had only the bare outline. A few could tell it in full. So most of what was lost went at the second handing-on, from the middle generation to the youngest, and far less at the first. And every generation had told the researchers that passing these stories on mattered.
You may be thinking that your family is different, that everybody in it knows Grandma's stories. That was true in Belgium too, one generation deep. The gap opened one step further down. And a story you were never told doesn't feel like a gap.
In three of the twenty families, though, one story had come down whole, through all three generations. Take two of them. In the first, a girl's father sent her to the local resistance leader with detonators, in a crate on her bicycle, with straw on top. A German sentry stopped her, because soldiers were at shooting practice on the road, and he took hold of the bicycle. Nobody searched her. That girl is the grandmother now, and as her family tells it, "She always says there was a big hairy hand on her handlebars."
In the second, the oldest was the resister himself, and his story was an attack on a German truck. The part his children and grandchildren cared about was the ending. A passer-by was shot in the buttock by mistake, the resistance leader gave him some money for his trouble, and the man said, "for that amount, you can shoot me in the other cheek".
What did those stories have in common? The researchers point to the strong feeling in them, and to the fact that each had happened to the very person telling it. So the younger generations had heard it straight from the source, and generally more than once. In another family altogether, the three generations were asked separately and all chose the same story. It had been told at Christmas, not long before, after a girl in the family learned about the war at school. A story told again lately is a story everybody has.
What got lost, the researchers suspect, was the unheroic. Somebody had gone out after curfew to guard the potato fields from thieves. Somebody had marked points on a map. Those were the stories the grandchildren were less likely to know. A family's own telling keeps the hairy hand and drops the potatoes.
Two cautions. This is one study of twenty families, in one country, asking for one story each. They were families with something to be proud of, and the researchers couldn't get enough collaborators' families to take part. And what it found is thinning, over a generation or two, and not complete oblivion. Every grandchild could tell some story about the war.
That is the first reason to record, and it takes a step of my own to get there. Heard from the source, more than once: after the source is gone, a recording is the only way that can still happen. Nobody in this research tested a recording, and a recording nobody plays keeps nothing alive. But a great-grandchild cannot hear it from her any other way.
The second reason is the one you're more likely to have been told: that knowing the family's stories is good for children. It comes from two psychologists at Emory University, Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush, who wrote a quiz of twenty yes-or-no questions. Do you know how your parents met? They used it first with younger children, and in 2010 they reported on sixty-six teenagers. The ones who knew more of the family's history thought better of themselves and had a firmer sense of who they were, even allowing for how well the family got along.
The limits are the authors' own. On behavior problems, once you allow for the family, knowing more made no difference. A study like that can't show what causes what, and its authors said so. And Fivush once put the limits more bluntly: "It's not as if children who come from families that don't tell stories turn out to be juvenile delinquents."
So my verdict is that there's something there, found more than once by this one group in small samples, and that it's about families who talk. I wouldn't record your grandmother as medicine for the grandchildren.
One girl who had just learned about the war at school was enough to set a story going in that Belgian family. The stories are there for the asking. That leaves whom to ask, and what to say to them. In order.
First, before you speak to anyone, decide what the recording is for and where it will be kept, because the person you ask will want to know. It might be for a family history, or to sit with the scrapbooks, or to go to a local library. Mamoo's family knew theirs: one cake, one booklet.
Second, choose one person. You're thinking of the oldest. The Smithsonian's advice is blunt: not your oldest relative. Begin with yourself, and put to yourself the questions you mean to ask. Then make your first real interview somebody you're comfortable with, because interviewing is hard, and is better learned on a friendly face.
I'd weigh one thing the Smithsonian leaves out. Ask whose time is shortest. In most of those Belgian families the researchers arrived too late for the resister. Isay's grandmother died when he was fifteen. So I read the Smithsonian's advice as advice about practice. Practice on yourself and on someone easy, soon, and then go to the person who can't wait. If they're the same person, there's nothing to decide.
Third, ask ahead of time. Don't arrive with the recorder. You might put it like this.
Grandma, I'd like to record you talking about your life, because it matters to me and I want the family to have it in your own voice. Just the two of us, at your table, for about an hour, and we stop the minute you're tired. I'll keep the recording with the family photographs. Would Saturday suit you?
That little speech had in it what the guides ask for: why you want it, that it will be recorded, where the recording will be kept, and a time and place that suit your narrator. It said how long, which is only fair. The firm rule is never to run a recorder without the narrator's knowledge. One person at a time is the rule in Baylor University's manual. Not every guide insists on it, and a later lecture says why.
If the answer is that there's nothing worth telling, expect it. Linda Shopes writes that many people believe they have little to say that would matter to history, and that they're mistaken. So say again, and plainly, why this account matters to you, which is what the Baylor manual advises. And if the answer is no, the narrator is entitled to it.
So, what are you making when you record your grandmother? Two things: a conversation, and the object it leaves behind. Dave Isay had the first. It's the second he went on looking for.
And is it worth the trouble? The trouble is some thought beforehand, an hour or so of listening, and a file to look after. I think it's worth that, though my best reason is an inference from one study.
An oral history is a made thing, and of its three marks the last, keeping it, is the easiest to fail. The people who began with significant lives and transcripts ended with everybody and the voice, and you can start where they ended. Left to talk alone, a family's stories reach the children mostly whole, and the grandchildren mostly in pieces or not at all. In those Belgian families the hand on the handlebars came through, and the potato field, it seems, mostly did not. What lasts is what was heard from the person it happened to, and heard again.
So choose the person, and ask.
One thing that study left alone. It counted what was lost and not what was changed, and an earlier German study had found grandchildren turning their grandfathers into heroes.
So think about the girl on the bicycle. She told the researchers that her memory of that day was very vivid. She was a child at the time, and that was three quarters of a century before, or more. So was there a big hairy hand on the handlebars?