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Never Underestimate the Power of a Bus: My Journey to Oral History

I first became interested in oral history while eavesdropping on a bus in London during the winter of 1980. I was a junior in college, studying theater in London for one year. On this particular day, I was sitting across the aisle from a pleasant-faced Englishwoman on the younger edge of old age. She was chatting with two young Americans, telling them stories about London during World War II. This is a subject of endless fascination to her generation, and from that day forward it fascinated me, too. Thirty-five years after the end of the war, I sat in safety and listened while bombs fell and the city I loved caught fire. Wartime London became the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation and my first book, but that was not my intention when I entered graduate school in 1988. I was studying folklore, not history, in large measure because I was interested in folk music. Though my original interest was folk music as an esthetic system, my professors (quite rightly) stressed the importance of context when analyzing esthetic products. To me, context meant looking at the historical conditions that gave rise to the songs. From studying the exquisite music of forgotten people, I went on to study the people themselves. I was fortunate that I was a student at Indiana University, which has an excellent oral history research center. I was fortunate that John Bodnar, the director of the center, is a historian who recognized that folklorists often possess interviewing skills that historians may not. He hired me to organize a massive oral history of Indiana University. For three years, I interviewed board