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Reviewed by:
  • Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits That Changed Rock, R&B and Pop by Marc Myers, and: So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens
  • Bud Kliment
Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits That Changed Rock, R&B and Pop. By Marc Myers. New York: Grove Press, 2016. 336 pp. Hardcover, $26.00.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley. By Roger Steffens. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017. 464 pp. Hardcover, $29.95.

Oral historians have debated for years about the true product of oral history—whether it is the recording, the transcript, or the interview itself. But many outside of the discipline think of oral history primarily as a literary genre, published work in which individuals offer observations or reflections about their experiences with a person, event, or institution. People are exposed to individual or group interviews that are edited, excerpted, and combined, or ones that are sometimes linked through an author's additional comments, insights, and reflections. Many publications, such as The New York Times, apply the label oral history to features that they publish, and it is also used to classify books by authors as different in their methodologies and intended readers as Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich. [End Page 360]

It is understandable that popular culture has embraced this literary form enthusiastically. Well-edited interviews are enjoyable to read, and readers get to experience a form of learning that can feel like a guilty pleasure, like overhearing gossip but not missing a single word, because someone transcribed the conversation. There is a general assumption that things that make their way into pop culture—songs, movies, memes, and the like—are rarely, if ever, sole endeavors, even if they are presented as such. So these collective, creative enterprises, especially those that find a large, devoted audience, often seem to offer a treasure trove of memories. That is what makes them so attractive for authors who want to use oral history to unpack superficially simple stories into complex interactions of individuals with many "true" stories to tell.

Is it a problem when oral history goes pop? Did oral historians labor for decades to have their work accepted as serious and legitimate, only to see it represented now by derivative "oral histories" of, for example, stand-up comics or musicians? Can the vital and elegant scholarship of Alessandro Portelli compete with Vanity Fair's star-studded profile of Mike Nichols (Sam Kashner and Charles Maslow-Freen, "Mike Nichols's Life and Career: The Definitive Oral History," Vanity Fair [October 2015])? Yes, it certainly can. Whatever your opinion of the label oral history, the field itself is undeniably established, vigorous, and diverse enough to include both the work of a Nobel Prize winner and a history of Star Trek, so long as oral history's singular ability to provide personal voice and insight is respectfully reflected in the result (see, for example, Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years [New York: St. Martin's Press, 2016]).

Two recent books labeled oral history, Marc Myers's Anatomy of a Song and Roger Steffens's So Much Things to Say, use oral history within a literary genre to look more closely at popular music. While one book is a critical survey and the other a biography, both books are serious and lively representatives of the oral history form. The interviews in these works broadly help to illuminate the creation and culture of music, which is perhaps the most elusive of the arts to capture and describe adequately using traditional historical research materials.

Anatomy of a Song is a compilation of columns that originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal, and in it Myers profiles, chronologically, various pop records from 1952 to 1991, including many that became hit singles—forty-five songs in total, a conceptual nod to the old seven-inch, forty-five RPM vinyl records. Each song is recalled using excerpted interviews Myers conducted either in person or by phone with one or more of its creators or performers.

In his...

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