Oral History in Kentucky

SPRING 2012 73 Collection Essay Oral History in Kentucky Sarah Milligan K entucky is unique in the field of oral history collection and accessibility . For over thirty-five years, the state has been a national leader in oral history, growing strong university-centered programs as well as hundreds of grassroots projects. This success highlights the dedication and quantity of the state’s oral historians but it also reflects the Kentucky Oral History Commission’s (KOHC) ongoing support and encouragement for oral history. This article examines the evolution of organized oral history in Kentucky and its relationship to national efforts in the field, highlights collection efforts of various scales, and discusses a sampling of Kentucky oral history-based products. This survey cannot recount every oral history collection or documentarian, but it provides some sense of the breadth and depth of state oral historians’ dedication and their broader contribution to the study of modern U.S. history. Understanding the uniqueness of the KOHC requires some appreciation of the development of the field of oral history. According to oral historian Donald Ritchie, Columbia University created the first modern oral history archives in 1948. By the mid-1950s, the wide availability of tape recorders enabled new oral history projects and programs to develop around the country. By the mid-1960s, the University of Texas (1952), the University of California, Berkeley (1954), and the University of California, Los Angeles (1959) had established new academic oral history programs and offices. The National Archives, home by the late 1940s to thousands of oral histories with World War II veterans (including those conducted by noted Kentucky field historian Forrest C. Pogue), began formal oral history collection with the creation of the Harry S. Truman Library in 1961. According to historian Rebecca Sharpless, “throughout the 1960s, oral history research expanded dramatically.… By 1965, the oral history movement had reached a critical mass.… Practitioners realized a need for standardization of practices and procedures.” In 1966, oral historians held their first national oral history meeting and a year later chartered the Oral History Association.1 While these changes took place across the nation, interest in oral history began brewing in Kentucky. The Appalachian Oral History Project, initially a cooperative effort between Alice Lloyd College and Lees Junior College in eastern Kentucky, began collecting an estimated thirteen hundred interviews with Kentucky residents in 1970. The creators of the project sought to “collect tape ORAL HISTORY IN KENTUCKY 74 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY recorded interviews of the history and folklore of the Central Appalachian region.” They stressed that “student research” would help develop “data for historians , folklorists, novelists, musicians, sociologists, and anthropologists who are interested in the Southern Highlands.” Similar projects appeared throughout the southern U.S. on the heels of the successful Foxfire project, created by Georgia English teacher Eliot Wigginton in 1966. Wigginton enlisted students to collect Appalachian folklore from their homes and published the content in Foxfire, a magazine later published by Doubleday in eleven compilation volumes. In 1982, the Foxfire project even generated a Broadway play. In Kentucky, Foxfire provided the inspiration for Wheelwright High School students who in 1986 published A Ride on the Mantrip, a collection of oral histories with local coal miners.2 In addition to these Appalachian-based grassroots projects, academic oral history programs started to appear throughout Kentucky. In 1971, Western Kentucky University (WKU) established its folklife archives to hold faculty and students’ recordings of oral history interviews and traditional music, photographs, manuscripts , and ethnographic field notes. In 1973, a landmark year for oral history in Kentucky, Murray State University established the Forrest C. Pogue Oral History Institute, the University of Kentucky (UK) created its Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, and the University of Louisville (UL) founded its Oral History Center.3 In 1976, with the popularity of oral history growing and the nation approaching its bicentennial celebration, two entrepreneurial Kentucky journalists, Al Smith and John Ed Pearce, approached Governor Julian Carroll to create a bicentennial oral history project commission. During the first meeting of the commission in May, Pearce stressed “the need…for an oral history commission to record the important events of past days in the history of Kentucky.” The commission...