This paper defines oral history as the narrative documentation of individual human lives and experiences, transmitted through voice and personal testimony. It argues that despite criticisms from academic historians who privilege written, objective sources, oral history provides essential access to the emotional and experiential dimensions of historical events that analytical frameworks often miss. The paper examines how oral historians use multiple voices and perspectives—drawing examples from jazz history and mining communities—to create a richer, more nuanced understanding of the past than singular analytical narratives can offer. While acknowledging memory's imperfections and the role of interviewer dynamics, the author contends that oral history remains a valuable and increasingly recognized historical form that captures "how history was experienced" rather than only its analytical aftermath.
Oral history is the narrative of individual human lives and experiences. The collection of individual human lives and experiences, transmitted through the filtering lens of individual narrative and the human voice, is catalogued and arranged by oral historians to reveal more about the emotional and factual texture of a particular period of human life. Rather than adopting the analytical lens of traditional history, the medium of oral history provides a discursive, meandering, but emotionally connective way of accessing how history was experienced during the time it was experienced—not simply how history affects our lives today in the eyes of philosophers, pundits, and professional historians.
Once, all of history was transmitted and preserved in a purely oral fashion. However, history is no longer a collection of myths and personal experiences judged to be significant only within relatively small communities. Today, history is something that must be academically validated and objective. This shift has caused some historians to state that the idea of oral history is a contradiction in terms. After all, Homer's Iliad is no longer considered history—it is merely a collection of myths voiced through the words of Greek poets. The "real history" of the Trojan War, as verified by archaeological data, is that it was a trade war between Greek city-states and a Turkish walled city. The Celtic culture, an entirely oral tradition, has been lost to much of succeeding generations partly because the Celtic people died out, but also partly because the accomplishments of purely oral cultures have been devalued in an increasingly written world that depends upon textual literacy rather than performance and kinesthetic skill.
However, one of the benefits of music and film entering the mainstream acceptance of high culture is the recognition by historians that heard, lived, and personal experience are also valid historical forms of documentation. Writing is not all that matters; our culture's shift in emphasis from the word to the voice and image instructs us otherwise. Oral history is a different form of history than history recorded by those who never lived through the events, but it is still history and an important component of understanding the past. One of the most valuable aspects of oral history lies in the fact that it is able to bring to life the physical, lived experience of individuals "in the moment" of history—experience that would otherwise be lost in an overly intellectualized, analytical framework.
For instance, in considering the oral history narratives in Central City Blues, the textual weaving of various California jazz and blues narratives documents suggests that the performative, musical experience is particularly interesting to view through the lens of oral history because so much of what is compelling about music is emotional and inexpressible in cool analysis or critique. Even though Central City Blues itself is a text, it still gives readers, through its transmission of interviewee voices, a better sense of the individual and impressionistic experience of music than would an historical, analytic overview. However, unlike a mere film of a performance, by structuring the interviews in a particular pattern, readers are better able to gain a multifaceted perspective of this moment in music and how it is perceived by those who created the music, as well as simply how the music sounds.
This is particularly true of music such as jazz that was experienced often quite literally in the moment and underwent seismic shifts within performances of improvisation. Jazz cannot be fully understood through the examination of transcribed scores and notes about composition—although it is worthy of note that we cannot even be sure we experience the music of Mozart and Beethoven as audiences experienced it in their own day, given the different timbre of instrumentation and different playing methodologies of the era.
However, the contradictions and differing impressions of various individuals within the text might seem to invalidate the oral cataloging of history as "history." One might respond that oral history is simply interesting tales, no different from myth, because it is so personal in nature. However, because life and history are experienced through human eyes, these apparent failures or contradictions often make such a perspective of history more valuable. This is not only true of interviews with blues artists. Northeastern Pennsylvania historians Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht, who interviewed mid-twentieth century miners, stated that "interviews with those who have faced modern-day long-term crises of economic decline suggest that unevenness is a valuable concept for our understanding this contemporary experience as well."
The multifaceted nature of presenting oral narratives as history, with all of their contradictions, enables historical understanding as a whole to be much richer. By interviewing many individuals, a historian may work against possible biases within individual perspectives. By presenting different perspectives, the reader may now judge the events and the credibility of the different sources while still gaining a sense of the emotional intensity of what it was like to "be there." Presenting a variety of narratives, as done in Dublin and Licht's article on the miners and in Central City Blues, also undercuts yet another criticism of oral history as a technique—that it is more an encapsulation of the rapport between interviewer and interviewee than a genuine rendering of how the individual was at the point in time being described. With different interviewers and different individuals, with striking contradictions as well as striking similarities of emotional expression, oral history presents a history of various shades and nuances rather than a linear line of analysis imposed by a historian.
Memory, of course, is imperfect. Individuals notoriously romanticize their own pasts, as can be observed during family reunions as well as in history. But although one must view oral history with this caveat, this criticism of romanticism may be applied against more conventional narrative histories as well. Michael Frisch has criticized oral history as being no history at all because "oral historical evidence, because of its immediacy and emotional resonance, has something almost beyond interpretation or accountability." It is anti-history, he says, because even though it seduces the reader or listener in seeming to give "a direct window on the feelings and on the meaning of past experience," it does not—it is only the history of the way an individual perceives his or her own personal psychology and past. But an individual historian who never lived through the moment, one could counter, might take an even more romantic view of the blues scene than one who actually lived through it—or a miner's strike, or World War II, or any historical event.
Frisch's critique further does not take into consideration the fact that even if this were all oral history could accomplish—namely, the emotional transmitting of personal experience and emotion—this alone would make oral history valuable. Consider the idea, for instance, that music was "all that mattered" to the artists of Central City Blues in contrast to young people today. This is not a historically documented fact, but it does suggest an emotive difference between the perceived importance of music as a cultural signification. The fact that Buddy Colette and Britt Woodman give completely different versions of how Charles Mingus started playing the bass—the fact that each man takes credit for suggesting that Mingus take up the instrument—says a great deal about the character of these two men, perhaps more than it does about Charles Mingus. It also illustrates the continuing importance of Mingus's body of work today, in that both men are willing to stake their reputations by claiming such involvement.
The different ways that the miners of Pennsylvania saw their economic oppression also paints a picture of the contemporary mining experience not with a singular "truth" but with a suggestion of a diffuse cultural moment in time. Their histories give not a singular "window" on history, as Frisch alleges, but a various filtration of different worldviews, with no one singular economic narrative to make sense of everything, as a historian might be tempted to impose. Regardless of whether presenting verbatim transcripts of interviews or a mixture of interview with background history intertwined, the plurality of voices of oral history is instructive even in contrast as well as in cohesion—perhaps even more interesting when the voices of historian and historical participants contradict as well as agree.
"Historians serve history ethically through careful interviewing practice"
You’re 89% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 1 section.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.