Excerpt: ‘Listening Is an Act of Love’

At about the same time I learned of a series of interviews from the 1930s and ’40s housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Most of these were conducted as part of the Works Projects Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project by a small cadre of historians and folklorists. (Alan Lomax; his father, John Lomax; and Zora Neale Hurston are the best known among them.) They drove throughout the country, lugging enormous acetate disk recorders in the trunks of their cars, to capture the stories and songs of everyday people.

On these recordings you can hear the voices of former slaves reflecting on their lives, prisoners in Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary singing work songs, Harlem fishmongers hawking their wares, pool players in Washington, D.C., talking about the bombing of Pearl Harbor the day after the attacks. Many of these were perfectly recorded. I was mesmerized. Hearing these voices transported me back in time in a way that no photograph, movie, or book ever had. They struck me as historic artifacts beyond value. I wondered why nothing along the lines of these WPA interviews had been undertaken ­since —­ top-­quality recordings of the voices of everyday Americans across the nation.

A few years later I produced a radio documentary about the last flophouses on the Bowery in New York City, where homeless men slept in ­prison-­cell-­size rooms covered in chicken wire for as little as five dollars a night. Later, the documentary was turned into a book of photographs and oral histories. I remember bringing early proofs of the book into a flophouse and sharing them with the residents. One of the men looked at his story, took it in his hands, and literally danced through the halls of the old hotel shouting, “I exist! I exist!” I was stunned. I realized as never before how many people among us feel completely invisible, believe their lives ­don’t matter, and fear ­they’ll someday be forgotten.

Out of these and a myriad of other experiences and influences, StoryCorps began taking shape in the summer of 2002. Having seen the positive impact that participating in documentary work could have on people’s lives, I wanted to open the experience up to everyone. I hoped to create a project that was all about the act of interviewing loved ones, with only a secondary emphasis on the final edited ­product — ­in essence inverting the purpose of traditional documentary work from an artistic or educational project created for the benefit of an audience to a process principally focused on enhancing the lives of the participants.

From there it was a matter of figuring out the details. I knew the interviews should be between two people who cared about each other. I wanted there to be some kind of a helper present who could run the equipment and assist in the process. I thought the sessions should take place in an intimate space. I wanted the interviews captured with the highest standards of excellence —­ even better than the recordings you hear on the radio. I thought forty minutes was probably about the right length of time for each session, since ­I’d found that interviews can sometimes drag once they get close to an hour.

I wanted participants to get a copy of the interview, but I also wanted to make sure that the session would never get lost. I made a cold call to Peggy Bulger, Director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, home to the WPA interviews I so admired. I told Peggy what I was thinking and asked if the Folklife Center might consider housing the collection. Miraculously, she said yes. The ground was laid for StoryCorps.

In early 2003, a small team of colleagues and I started piloting the project. We rented a recording studio in Manhattan’s Chinatown and built a simulated booth out of ­seven-­foot-­tall pieces of thick acoustic foam. I invited my ­great-­uncle Sandy to record the first session. Sandy was ­eighty-­eight years old at the time, the last living family member of my grandparents’ generation. He had been married to my grandmother’s sister Birdie for ­fifty-­five years. She had passed away several months before the interview. Unlike Birdie and her sisters, my ­great-­uncle Sandy was not an ­over-­the-­top character. I knew him as a gentle, quiet man with a dry sense of humor. I ­wasn’t at all sure if the interview would work.

Uncle Sandy and I sat together in this mock booth, and for forty minutes he told me stories ­I’d never heard before. He talked about his first date with Birdie, how ­he’d asked her to meet him on a tenement stoop on Manhattan’s Fourteenth Street. “I see this vision of purple coming down the street,” he recalled. “She was so glamorous, and I thought, ‘What the hell is she going to see in me, a ­two-­bit farm boy?’ That’s when I tried to duck out. I turned and tried to get in the door. But it was locked. And I often think if that door was open, it would have ended there. It was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.” With that, he broke down weeping.

At the end of the session I asked him how it felt. “I hate to say this, but it’s a good feeling,” he said. “I ­don’t have to act like I’m happy with everythin­g — ­because I’m not. And I never will be.” At ­eighty-­eight, Sandy still drove around New York City in his car. I learned that he would listen to that CD of his interview over and over again on his drives. A good sign.

StoryCorps is, if nothing else, an experiment in human communication. Leading up to the opening, I had all sorts of concerns about whether we could actually pull it off. Would we get Jerry Springer ­moments —­ families zinging each other during sessions and breaking into screaming ­fights —­ or worse? Would people make reservations to use the booth as a personal recording studio and cut song demos? Would participants agree to sign the release at the end of the session so that the material could go to the Library of Congress? How would they feel about having the facilitator in the booth? Would the idea just ­flat-­out fail?

Happily, from the day we opened in October 2003 it was clear that this little booth in the middle of Grand Central Terminal was something of a miracle.

The first thing we noticed were the tears, not unlike with my uncle Sandy. A facilitator told us about a husband and wife who came to reminisce about their lives. At some point in the interview the husband started to talk about his experiences liberating a concentration camp after World War II. He began to weep. Then he really started to cry. At the end of the session the wife told the facilitator that ­they’d been married for fifty years, but that this was the very first time ­she’d ever seen her husband cry. They both proclaimed their StoryCorps interview a wonderful experience.

At around the same time, an ­eighty-­nine-­year-­old grandmother came to StoryCorps with her twenty-­three-­year-­old grandson. She recorded a beautiful interview about growing up in immigrant Jewish New York, meeting her husband, her feelings for her children and grandchildren. At the end of the session, the grandson asked, “Grandma, is there anything you want to tell me ­you’ve never told anyone before?” And the grandmother proceeded to tell her grandson that she had been molested by her uncle as a child. Nobody in the family had heard anything about this. The grandmother said it was a great relief to get it off her chest. She expressed no qualms about signing the release to place the interview in the Library of Congress. She was so proud of the session that she invited Story­Corps to her ninetieth birthday celebration to play excerpts for her family and friends.

Indeed, in the weeks after we opened, almost all of the participants signed the release for their interview to go to the Library of Congress. Since then, upward of 95 percent of StoryCorps participants have placed their interviews in this archive. Many people say that knowing their recording is safe for future generations is one of the most important elements of their StoryCorps experience. It makes sense. Since I fell in love with radio twenty years ago, ­I’ve come to believe that there’s something of the soul captured in the human voice and that an audio recording is one of the most intimate and powerful records one can leave behind.

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