In praise of the cultural oral history
Never met an oral history I didn’t love.
Oral histories are the perfect format book for the time poor. You can open at any page and learn something or entertain yourself in five minutes flat. I first got hooked in the early 90s, starting with Days in the Life* (Jonathon Green’s seminal deep dive into London’s 60s counterculture), swiftly followed by his equally brilliant It: Sex Since the Sixties* (more 60s rompage) and later, Them: Voices from the Immigrant Community in Contemporary Britain*, a fascinating investigation into British immigrant life (Green mentioned recently that he’s planning an update, which is amazing news).
Then there’s the classic, Edie: An American Biography* by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, and Truman Capote* by George Plimpton as well as two punk bibles; Please Kill Me* by Legs McNeill and Gillian McCain, and Punk Rock: An Oral History* by John Robb.
I’m fascinated by the art of the oral history. In the late 90s I had ambitions of doing my own on dance music and club culture. I managed about five interviews and then got distracted by actually earning a living. Interviewing/transcribing/editing is time consuming and that’s before the dark art of somehow piecing the various accounts together into a coherent timeline. Does one even try to fact check? I guess not, which is part of the beauty of the oral history. It’s every interviewee’s own version of events as they recall them. Which makes for a few contradictory reports which the editor then needs to decide whether to include or leave out.
Next on my list: Jean Stein’s 2016 Tinseltown tell-all, West of Eden: An American Place. (Stein herself sounds like quite the legend.)
WORDS: Disneyrollergirl / Navaz Batliwalla
IMAGE: Navaz Batliwalla / Disneyrollergirl
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