The Past Meets the Present
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THE PAST MEETS THE PRESENT Essays on Oral History Edited by David Stricklin Rebecca Sharpless Copyright @ 1988 by University Press of America, ® Inc. 4720 Boston Way Lanham, MD 20706 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU England All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Past meets the present. Includes index. 1. Oral history. I. Stricklin, David. 1952- II. Sharpless, Rebecca. D16.14.P37 1988 907’.2 87—3l581 ISBN 0—8191—6770—3 (alk. paper) ISBN 0—8191—6771—1 (pbk.: alk. paper) All University Press of America books are produced on acid-free paper which exceeds the minimum standards set by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. CONTENTS Foreword v Introduction vii Contributors xi I. THE NATURE OF ORAL HISTORY 1 ORAL HISTORY: WHAT IS IT AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM? William W. Moss 5 ORAL HISTORY: THE FOLK CONNECTION Barbara Allen 15 REACHING ACROSS THE GENERATIONS: THE FOXFIRE EXPERIENCE Eliot Wigginton 27 ORAL HISTORY AS BIOGRAPHY Vivian Perlis 43 PANEL DISCUSSION 1 57 II. THE STATE OF THE CRAFT 73 SUCCESS AND EXCESS: ORAL HISTORY AT HIGH TIDE Cullom Davis 77 III. PERSPECTIVES ON ORAL HISTORY: THREE CASE STUDIES 87 TALKING ABOUT THE AMERICAN PAST: ORAL HISTORY AND AMERICAN STUDIES Barbara Allen 91 FOXFIRE AND THE EDUCATIONAL MAINSTREAM Eliot Wigginton with Christopher Crawford 101 PERSPECTIVES ON AMERICAN MUSIC Vivian Perlis 119 119 IV. THE PROSPECTS FOR ORAL HISTORY 129 129 ORAL HISTORY: WHERE IS IT GOING? William W. Moss 133 PANEL DISCUSSION 2 141 INDEX 149 FOREWORD As we read this volume and consider its approaches to oral history, we should remember that in the beginning was "the word." Oral epics which were later written down provide our earliest glimpse of literary expression through examples such as Beowulf, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the Pentateuch. This "inexhaustible voice" will surely be heard, as Faulkner predicted, when that "last ding dong of doom has clanged and faded." It precedes and will outlive the written word as the deepest and most permanent expression of the human heart. As an outsider, that is, one who was not present at the symposium which produced these essays, it is fascinating to read the varied approaches the speakers bring to their subject. It is also heartening to know that the Baylor University Institute for Oral History continues to pioneer the study of oral tradition with such thoroughness and determination. Their work is part of a broader effort by Americans to understand their nation through voices of fellow countrymen and women. Whether speakers be "great leaders" or "the people," elders or children, their thoughts are significant and add to our understanding of American culture and its rich regional variations. Oral history unveils intimate, private worlds that create bridges between races, regions, gender, and age groups and bind us with people in every part of the world. While oral history can be used effectively to study artists such as Charles Ives, its most dramatic results are seen with working class folk whose oral traditions are in fact intimately linked. Twain openly acknowledges his debt to folk speech as he begins Huckleberry Finn, and Ralph Ellison eloquently reflects on black folklore and literature in Shadow and Act. It is interesting to note how recent works of literature and oral history borrow both form and content from each other. Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is frequently read as oral history rather than as fiction. Gaines's young white interviewer who approaches Miss Jane and convinces her to talk is all too believable and familiar, the reader feels, to be read as fiction. Theodore Rosengarten's All God's Dangers, on the other hand, might well be read as fiction. With a style reminiscent of Faulkner, Nate Shaw recalls generations of family and friends who populate a world similar to Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. As Barbara Allen points out, oral tradition is a form of literature, and its sensitive treatment by a gifted scholar such as Rosengarten raises oral history to the level of art. Writers are instinctively drawn to storytellers as counterparts whose craft is easily adapted to their own. Faulkner's Texas trader. Stamper, in The Hamlet and Eudora Welty's dramatic monologue "Why I Live at the P.O." clearly draw on the southern storytelling tradition. As we recognize the inherent beauty and importance of oral history, we should note that it is also a key to literature as writers adapt both its structure and its content into their own work. The human voice is the focus of the writer. Once he or she hears it and sets it in a fictional place through literature, it is understood by all. Like the writer of fiction, we can understand both the specific and the universal human experience through the spoken word. This fine study of oral history effectively moves us from children in Rabun County, Georgia, to a Connecticut composer and helps each of us discover the spoken word and its relation to the broadest ranges of experience. William Ferris University of Mississippi INTRODUCTION Oral history has come of age. After many years of discussing and debating the nuts and bolts of interviewing and transcribing methodologies and other basic concepts and definitions, practitioners have begun to think of oral history in the larger picture: what it means and what its values are. The possibilities for discussions of this type are endless; we cannot claim that the considerations presented in this volume are definitive, but they are intended as some of many necessary, toddling steps toward a deeper exploration of the subject known as oral history. The symposium represented by these proceedings had its beginnings in conversations around the offices of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. With over half a century of experience in oral history, the institute staff members have had time to draw some conclusions about the nature and value of this practice and the body of material it produces. When we step back from doing oral history long enough to consider its values and philosophy, our conversations tend to assume something basic, that the oral history interview is a unique experience, one of the most personal and telling ways in which the past and present intersect. In the interview setting, people of various backgrounds and temperaments, with widely differing expectations about the purposes and lasting worth of the interview, create through it a record of experience of profound meaning. Though a great deal of interviewing consists of slogging through tedium, even this can have an extraordinary power in the depiction of events and the very fact that people are cooperating to assure those events will not be forgotten. Our overarching question, then, is, besides the simple exchange of information, what happens when two people sit down together in the setting of the oral history interview? Our attempt to answer that question is The Past Meets the Present, a symposium held October 7 and 8, 1985, at Baylor University, and herewith a volume of proceedings. In Barbara Allen, Cullom Davis, William W. Moss, Vivian Perlis, and Eliot Wigginton, we sought for the symposium speakers who are philosophers as well as practitioners of oral history, people who could speak thoughtfully about the place of the individual's memory in the overall sweep of historical understanding. Though they are not the only such people, these speakers represented to us one of the most articulate and provocative groups that we could assemble. They did not disappoint us. The quality of their thinking was matched by the care and good humor with which they imparted it, both on stage and off. The five speakers brought a wide spectrum of experiences and ideas; all shared a finely wrought sense of ethics and standards of quality in oral history methodology. Their audience was a widely varied one, including many students. Speakers and audience interacted in the spirit and sense of a true symposium, which by definition must be a learned discussion which involves the audience in the deliberations. Program members maintained a high level of dialogue with those in attendance; they spoke with us as much as to us. The symposium was a unique event. What can be said of a volume of papers and panels intended to represent this high discourse? As everyone who has tried to edit a volume of proceedings knows, as does probably everyone who has ever attended a conference and then read such a volume, some occurrences simply do not translate into print. Missing are some of the things that often make a public discussion most memorable, such as continuity jokes, on a superficial level, and running commentaries from the audience. On a deeper level, missing also from this publication is the wave of emotion that had some listeners at the point of tears during Eliot Wigginton's stories about the alliances between young and old in the Foxfire project. The delight of Baylor School of Music students at Vivian Perlis's intimate knowledge of Charles Ives and personal relationship with Aaron Copland is irreproducible. Difficult also to depict in print are the joy and deep appreciation Barbara Allen has for the stories people have shared with her, some of which she shared with us. Another matter in the process of translating a conference such as this into print is the fact that some words are written for the eye, some for the ear. Speakers' asides, intended to make material more acceptable to the "live" audience, sometimes help make meaning clearer to the reader of a printed text as well.