The Voices of Fiddlers Grove
Nearly a year ago, I chanced into something that has rearranged the way I see our world. While listening to NPR one afternoon, I found myself enthralled by a simple voice telling a simple story; it was the voice of a woman calmly sharing a vignette from her own life. She was not a celebrity or a person of interest that any of us would recognize, nor was performing a part in an entertainment show. She was just a person, talking about something in her life. In that brief moment I was in her world, in a different time and space; that is the power of an oral history. After being lost in her words for a few brief moments, I found myself paying close attention through the segment’s closing music in order to know the name of the program that had so completely held my attention: it was StoryCorps. While the radio program is interesting by its own virtues, the really amazing thing I’m sharing today is the that the StoryCorps program is available to us all. It is our hope here at Fiddlers Grove that it will help us capture, save and share the oral histories of our community.
If you have the time, I’d highly recommend starting your exploration of the StoryCorps program with this video.
Through it’s website, I discovered that StoryCorps has locations in Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta. They even have a mobile booth tour that travels the country each year. While they did recently visit nearby Nashville, thus placing them within reach of Fiddlers Grove, their booth-based recording platform didn’t seem to be a very good fit for helping us in our mission to preserve the history of Wilson County, Tennessee. But then I discovered the StoryCorps app!
Through its web-based platform, StoryCorps is now available for anyone that wants to help save our oral histories before they are lost. We have recently set up a free account: Voices of Fiddlers Grove. By recording interviews with our friends, family members and neighbors, we can work to preserve their stories through StoryCorps’ partnership with the American Folklife Center, a branch of the Library of Congress. This unprecedented opportunity not only offers archival resources beyond our wildest dreams, it also provides us a reach that we can barely imagine in terms of audience and scope. But here’s the really amazing feature of this program: through the use of simple keywords, anyone can capture, upload and retrieve stories on behalf of Fiddlers Grove. This remarkable feature of the StoryCorps app, available for both iOS and Android smartphones and tablets via their respective app stores, allows individual uploaded stories to be tagged with keywords, regardless of the source of the interview, thus allowing for the retrieving and sharing of recorded stories among groups, topics and targeted campaigns.
As we begin our Voices of Fiddlers Grove project, we will share our keyword campaign and interview question list suggestions with anyone we can reach, through this publication and many others. Just imagine: even if we can only get fifty people to begin using the app, and each person only records two stories each, we will have one hundred precious oral histories of Wilson County saved for future generations to come!
In the coming weeks, I’ll work with the rest of the executive board of the Fiddlers Grove Foundation and the interested volunteers to spread the great news of this program, to establish the keywords that we’ll use for our campaign and to develop the interview question list that’ll we’ll use when collecting the stories of our history. Please feel free to contact me through this publication or through any other means if you’re interested in learning more or to get involved!
