The Significance of Oral History

No song lives until it is sung and heard
No story lives until it is told and heard.

—Ruth Tooze—

Language is the heart of a culture. By examining the ways individuals use language, a wide variety of information can be derived about a society and its way of doing things. Language includes not only words and the rules that help put those words together into meaningful patterns, language is also embodied in the subtle ways our faces move when speaking. It includes gesture and inflection as well. These forces move subtly, but powerfully, giving full meaning to the symbols we call words. Though the focus of oral history is to shed light on events and feelings from the past, its uniqueness lies in its ability to reveal language in its fullest sense, giving us a glimpse into the culture and personality of the teller.

Oral history reveals cultures and individuals by presenting oral commentary of events, situations, and feelings of individuals. Unfortunately, personal performance is a fleeting thing. Spoken words evaporate as instantly as they are spoken. The gesture is lost, the atmosphere in the performance space cannot be reincarnated, the subtle inflections so important to any meaningful communication vanish. The ethereal nature of oral history is also its strength and what makes it an art form if performed will skill. The performance of one’s life history is a wonderfully important and significant event for those present at that time.

We can also attempt to record our oral histories through sound and video technologies. Though it is merely an attempt, it is an important attempt, for it allows us to access the told information in an unadulterated way. Through recordings we can still have the words and much of the information; we can even capture inflection and perhaps even gesture and facial subtleties. These things are significant and vital. The performance of an oral history is raw and powerful commentary. All history is jaded by interpretation, but oral history makes no pretenses about being subjective. Its subjectivity is its strength.

Oral histories provide an effective tool that allows us to preserve oral traditions, skills and crafts. The full cultural or individual significance of quilting or the making of a musical instrument can only be obtained through the nuance and subtlety of oral language. Thus we can learn much from a personal history that we could never obtain from a textbook.

Oral histories have two important facets. They are referential and evaluative. The ways in which an oral history attempts to linguistically correspond to the chronology and details of actual events is its referential aspect. This gives the performance a sense of beginning, middle and end. The evaluative aspect manifests itself in the ways an oral history attempts to give meaning and significance to both the performer and the events of the story through the complete language of performance. Together, these two functions provide vital, personal interpretation of past events in a logical, meaningful way.

Oral histories allow the language of an individual and a culture to be manifest. They are engaging, significant commentaries about the past from a deeply individual perspective.