Week 8, Oral History: A Living, Breathing Subject

(The International Sweethearts of Rhythm at the Black & Tan Speakeasy in Seattle, WA, Sept. 24, 1944. Photo by Al Smith Sr. CREDIT COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL AFRO-AMERICAN MUSEUM AND CULTURAL CENTER)

The Oral History Manual provides a practical guide to doing oral history. Similar to Serrell’s exhibit label tutorial, this book takes a step based approach to explain the planning, funding, conducting and processing of an oral history project. Sommer and Quinlan also emphasize the main objectives and guiding principles of conducting interviews with an eye towards accessibility. In obtaining copyright of the interview, the actual interview process, the equipment used, and the eventual archival processing, the underlying goal should be to provide access to the material for both future study and the maintenance of the narrators’ stories. While the authors provide a guide to legal and ethical concerns, the remainder of this week’s readings, written by practitioners of oral history, delve into the nuanced issues surrounding the method.

Frisch’s essay, written in 1979, calls for a more “self-conscious and reflective sense of the nature of oral history,” and decries those who would argue the self-evident importance of oral histories themselves. I think that Sommer and Quindlan’s manual, published 30 years later, addresses those issues with a step dedicated to research and planning of questions, narrator research, and a focus on the mission statement of the project. The interviewers should be asking open ended questions, but ones that address the gaps in the written record and give voice to the traditionally marginalized.

In trying to give voice to the marginalized, Sherrie Tucker finds a presentist flaw in her line of inquiry. In her research, she has two apparent objectives. The first is to tell the stories of these “all girl” bands and their lifelong fight to be seen as “real musicians” (this WWII era battle continues to this day, but that’s a topic for a different blog post). The second is to present “complexity and flexibility to theorizing sexuality in musical discourses” (297). However, as a feminist scholar working in the 1990s, Tucker finds herself privileging the stories of “out” lesbians and grows frustrated with those who won’t come out to her. Eventually, in order to more fully understand the culture and risks of homosexuality amongst women musicians in the 1940s, Tucker realizes that she has to give meaning to the silence and not to champion “out-ness” with a feminist objective. Living, breathing sources forced Tucker to question and adapt her method to address the ethical ramifications of her scholarship.

Fink’s dissection of community memory of a Southern milltown grapples with ethical issues that extend into a fight and possible legal battle with his subjects. His discussion of the Rumleys’ promotion of a white Southern nationalist heritage erupts in controversy mid-research. The Rumleys, as former socialists and current racists, do not like the picture Fink paints of them, claiming that it is not “history.” Interestingly, their idea of “history” falls under the category of very problematic heritage tourism that seeks to restore a Jim Crow era South: “By preserving, reconstructing and celebrating that older world, they suggested today’s more beleaguered common folk might yet regain their inheritance” (124). Faced with the silence of these two normally outspoken community historians, Fink tells their story through an oral history of the Black members of the community the Rumleys ignore, as well as interviews of their past acquaintances and current rivals.

 

Fink and Tucker deal with silent narrators very differently. Yes, they both adapt their research models, but Fink continues along a line of inquiry that the Rumleys demanded he renounce. I would like to know what the guidelines are for ignoring your research subjects. Obviously the Rumleys, if left unchecked, were (and still are) doing dangerous exclusionary history, so it is essential for them to be challenged. What do you do with a narrator that must be challenged and questioned and analyzed even if they haven’t agreed to the study? What do you prioritize: narrator or research? Ultimately, this week’s readings show the merits of oral history in its ability to provide alternative perspectives that are emotionally engaging and enrich the traditional historical narrative, while also leaving me with a thousand and one questions about doing ethically sound history.

 

Readings:

Leon Fink, “When Community Comes Home to Roost: The Southern Milltown as Lost Cause,” The Journal of Social History 40 (Fall 2006): 119-145.

 

Michael Frisch, “Memory History and Cultural Authority” in A Shared Authority: Essays on Craft and Meaning in Oral and Public History (New York: SUNY Press, 2009), 1-54.

 

Sherrie Tucker, “When Subjects Don’t Come Out,” Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002): 293-310.

 

Sommer and Quinlan, The Oral History Manual