Ralph Waldo Emerson believed there was no history, only biography.
In that case, National Public Radio’s roving StoryCorps trailer, a nickel-bright Airstream with the aerodynamics of a bullet and the immutability of a time capsule, is probably as close to an Emersonian ideal as can be found in modern life: Visitors climb into the camper as historians; they climb off it biographers. The trailer now has one week left in its 21-day encampment in Little Rock’s River Market, where the project has collected almost 60 hours of the personal narratives and vocal tics of Arkansans for enshrinement in the Library of Congress and — if the narratives are sufficiently personal and the tics sufficiently ticcy — potential broadcast over the radio. But StoryCorps began life in 2003 as a stand-alone oral-history project in New York’s Grand Central Station, with one person prompting another — maybe a loved one, maybe a new acquaintance — to relate personal anecdotes or long-form memories for the record, in a format not unlike an audio version of an instant-photo booth. Like all big and great ideas for new and better ways of doing things, it filtered west into the heartland.
StoryCorps is not an idea for a new way of doing things — what happens is just storytelling, sitting across a table, having a conversation, finding a thread, pinching it still and setting forward with a new stitch. But it is a better way of doing them. Participants tell their stories — by the end of Story-Corps’ Little Rock stop around 240 Arkansans, mostly in pairs, will have boarded the trailer for 40-minute chat sessions — and somebody else, a project facilitator, records the exchange and masters it on a compact disc.
As the storytellers debark, the facilitator gives them a copy of the CD and the unspoken but abiding affirmation that even if all they could remember of their first true love was an argyle sweater and an aversion to curry, they have saved a precious and exceptional piece of data to the hard drive of human experience. There is no banality, only biography.
Ralph Waldo Emerson died almost 20 years too early to have met Flo Franklin, and from the sound of things on a recent Saturday afternoon at StoryCorps, he was the worse for it.
It wasn’t the promise of a compact disc of herself talking that drew the 96-year-old Little Rock woman, a former internationally known singer and later one of the state’s first female real estate agents, to board a cramped trailer and talk about her life.
“I got roped into this,” Franklin said, to no one in particular. When someone in particular laughed, she protested. “I mean it !”
“I’ve taken a tape recorder over to her apartment before, but she’d say, ‘Oh, my voice sounds so bad, ’” said Franklin’s daughter, Jane Goff, as the two waited their turn to enter the trailer and situate themselves behind microphones in the sound booth. Goff has a niece who works at the Historic Arkansas Museum, near StoryCorps’ temporary Little Rock installation at Rock and Commerce streets, and who had heard notices on KUAR-FM, 89. 1, about the project’s Arkansas presence. “She called and said, ‘We need Nonni to do this.’ So I just went over to mother’s and told her we had this scheduled.” UNCENSORED, UNSCRIPTED
Esteeming vernacular manners of speech nearly as much as interview content, StoryCorps workers dissuade participants from following scripts, and the stack of notation-filled papers Goff clutched to her chest wasn’t the text of the 40-minute conversation she intended to record with her mother, but rather, a timeline to keep them on course.
“She was born in 1910,” she said, as much for her own presession benefit as for a reporter’s notebook. “When she was 5, a man was visiting his sister next door and she went over and sang a little song for him. The man hugged her and kissed her and told her she was a beautiful girl and that someday she would be able to tell her children and her grandchildren she got a hug and a kiss from William Jennings Bryan.”
If that seems a little egotistical of William Jennings Bryan, so much the better: A good story is a good story. “Do you want more ?” Franklin asked. Did we. Franklin gazed up from a folding chair where she was resting her legs before going inside the trailer. Her perfectly set silver hair shone above a pair of Chanel earrings and a pantsuit with a black-and-white, Pollocklike print. When she spoke, her voice had a throaty elegance.
In Paris and London in the 1920 s and ’ 30 s, “I sang for the Duke and Duchess of York,” said Franklin (stage name: Florence Starr ). “And for the maharaja. They all came to Paris, and they didn’t want them to be bored. If there was royalty in the audience, they wouldn’t tell us until just before curtain. But I was never nervous. You couldn’t see them anyway. It was dark.”
Franklin also performed in a show with Josephine Baker, notorious for dancing in a miniskirt formed from dangling bananas. “I was the ingenue singer. I sang love songs. I wore an ermine coat — it was very valuable. They had a valet come and bring it to me, then take it away again after the scene was over.
“ So,” — she paused, not a little bit wickedly — “no bananas.”
She went on: Auditioning in Hollywood to be the voice of Walt Disney’s Snow White. Singing and dancing in a studio commissary with Shirley Temple. Meeting her husband at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, where she had an engagement to sing with an orchestra. “He said it was love at first sight.”
Soon, Ryan Murdock, the 25-year-old StoryCorps worker who would be recording the motherdaughter interview, came and knelt at Franklin’s side. Murdock told her he was excited to hear her stories.
“Don’t get too excited,” she counseled him. “I might pass out. And this was all before you were born. I’m an ancient mariner, you know.”
So, surely Franklin’s story would rise to the level of a radiobroadcastworthy interview ? During sessions Murdock or another worker sit in, prompt the interviewer if necessary, and, for archival purposes, keyword the recordings by subject matter — “neighborhood stories,” perhaps, “first kiss,” or “World War II.” He said StoryCorps’ Little Rock stop had produced no more and no fewer potential radio breakouts than any other city.
“It’s sort of intuitive,” he said. “We look for a moment of particular honesty, a moment of genuine communication, moments that kind of hit you. Even if people describe something fairly mundane, if they describe it well, that can make it come alive.”
Parent-child interviews like Franklin and Goff’s are Story-Corps staples, but so far in Little Rock, Murdock said, “we’ve had co-workers, a lesbian couple, singles.” For times when someone has a story to tell but no one in his life who wants to sit and hear it, the project facilitator fills in as the interviewer. “It’s been pretty much any relationship you could dream up.”
Murdock registered no surprise that the Little Rock StoryCorps slots filled so quickly, despite the media involved — a relatively no-frills audio CD — being nothing you can watch or manipulate interactively.
“I think people really want to get back to an oral tradition that we lose in the digital age,” he said. Then the story engineer grinned knowingly. “If you want a nice little sound bite.”
LIVING HISTORY Even if few Arkansas Story-Corps interviews make it onto NPR, the state won’t lack for applications of similarly methodical oral-history collection projects. In his Storytelling Encyclopedia: Historical, Cultural and Multiethnic Approaches to Oral Traditions Around the World, editor David Adams Leeming calls storytelling “a survival impulse, like the drives for nourishment, shelter and procreation,” and certainly Arkansans have turned to story to sort out dark episodes from the state’s consciousness.
Much of our understanding of the Japanese-American experience at the Arkansas internment camps comes from oral history accounts. And when the Arkansas Repertory Theatre debuts its Central High-themed play next September for the 50 th anniversary of 1957 ’s desegregation, much of the dialogue and monologue for the work will be culled from around 90 oral histories that producers have spent the past year collecting from members of the Little Rock Nine, students in the “lost class” from the closing of the city’s high schools, bystanders and even current Central High School students.
“Sure, we could have created a piece where we didn’t go to these primary sources,” said Bob Hupp, producing artistic director for the theater. “We could have drawn from the public record or from works of fiction, but when you have such rich, immediate history, it’s more engaging and meaningful to go to the source. It’s the authenticity, the real voice, that speaks so movingly to this project.”
The play, whose working title is The Legacy Project, will be directed by Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj, who directed Dreamgirls for The Rep and served as assistant director on the Tonynominated Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun. Maharaj is conducting many of the oral histories himself.
“He has said to me that some of these accounts that have been brought to us in the first person have been so moving and so real that they could definitely stand alone as performance monologues,” Hupp said of Maharaj’s work. “He’s used a phrase to me more than once: ‘This section wrote itself today. ’”
Gabe Gentry is in the process of editing 250 hours of oral histories with Arkansas’ World War II veterans for In Their Words, an online oral history project sponsored by the Arkansas Educational Television Network, where Gentry works as a producer.
The goal of the project, Gentry said, is to “transform history into more than just a list of places and dates. What really makes the stories special is that they take what would be a keyword term on a test, like Battle of the Bulge, and would allow a teacher to pull up a testimonial from Herbert Stanford in Arkadelphia and hear about what it’s like to dig a foxhole in the frozen ground — what it sounded like, what it smelled like.”
SILENCE IS A VIRTUE At 26 years old, Gentry is comfortably within the age range of people that oral-history conversation-starters like StoryCorps hope to indoctrinate as recorders of their grandparents’ memories. But, unlike many people his age, Gentry has a professional investment to go with his curatorial streak. “My number one advice as an interviewer is silence,” he says. “If they finish a thought and you know there’s more, just don’t say anything. “ A great example of that is a question for the project where we ask [the former soldiers ] who they first saw when they got back from overseas,” Gentry continues. “There was this man in Benton, all he said was, ‘My Dad was off work, a guy from a gas station dropped me off at the house and that’s when I saw him.’ I just didn’t say anything, just held the gaze. I was thinking, ‘There’s something else there. It’s OK to say it.’ So he went on: expressing his curiosity about — and ultimately appreciation for — his grandmother’s constant state of worry about him.
“ She would rubber-band a 20-dollar bill to a package of peanut butter crackers before I went over to a friend’s house,” he said. “At times I’ve asked, ‘Why can’t you get a hobby ? Why can’t you read a book ? Start a bridge night ?’ She’ll have none of it. She has about six people in her immediate family, and about 5 o’clock she sits down on the couch and starts dialing until she can get every one of them to answer. If she doesn’t get a progress report, she can’t go to bed.
“ I finally asked her about it and she said, ‘It’s because you’re my life. ’”
Gentry has been listening to ‘ He was home for lunch, he was out delivering an order of boats when I got dropped off — that’s how we saw each other.’ I just stayed silent. And finally he talked about how they both ended up bawling in the middle of the driveway, how it was the first time he’d seen his father cry, how neither of them had thought he’d be coming back at the bus station a few years earlier. He became an 18-year-old again. ”
Like those old hair-club ads where the president is also a client, unsurprisingly, Gentry also stepped aboard the StoryCorps trailer as an interviewer. He brought along his grandmother. Rather than pressing her for details of her girlhood or Depression-era coping strategies, Gentry wanted to go on record the StoryCorps-provided CD of the conversation with his grandmother while driving in his car. “It was neat to hear me finally say some of those things to her I want her to know. Despite my frustrations about having to check in, it’s nice to have somebody that cares that much about you.
“ So often you have dinners with people and you share your holidays with your family, but you never ask them questions,” Gentry muses. “How they feel about you, if they have regrets in life, about their first love. You don’t know those things because you never ask. ’
“ What StoryCorps does is provide that venue,” he says. “That’s all you can do in there, is ask those questions.”
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