The River Sings Songs and Tells Stories:

A Case for the Inclusion of Soundscapes in Oral History Practice

By Robin Miniter

A thesis submitted to the

Faculty of Columbia University
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of Master of Arts in Oral History

New York, New York October 2017

Acknowledgements

Finding a place to begin celebrating my gratitude necessitates the acknowledgement of all those
who I carry with me:

To Anthony Weller and Kylee Smith: My two dear friends who taught me the power a story
holds, and without whom I dont think Id quite understand what it means to truly live.

To Pat Taylor: My mentor, my champion, and the Thelma to my Louise (in the best, most
positive way possible, of course), without whose firm belief and eagle-eye I would be a far less
astute person of this world.

To MMC & Amy Starecheski: Two fierce women who helped me to find my voice and style as
an oral historian; who taught me the rules and how to make them my own; without whose
guidance and encouragement, this endeavor wouldnt have become more than a series of
notebook scratches; from whom I needed to hear that one secret to fieldwork is just showing up,
which applies to so much more than this project.

To John Biewen, to Eve Abrams, to Doug Boyd: For all of your brain pickin and shop-talking
and finely-tuned ears, I thank you.

To Emma Courtland: My creative partner who has showed me that this worklike so much of
lifeis far more exciting and illuminating when tackled together. Thank you for conceding to be
my friend in light of my inability to stay awake during a movie; for always asking the hard
questions and knowing the right answers; for instilling confidence (and burritos) in me; and
mostly, for being you.

To Benji de la Piedra: Never have I known such a heart and such an equal. To the years of
adventures (and collaborating, and dreaming, and scheming) that are right on down the road, and
for helping this projectand my selfbecome their best versions: thank you.

To Ike and Sally Lassiter, and my new friends in Hot Springs, N.C: For answering my initial e-
mail and taking a chance on welcoming a dreadlocked Yankee lady into your home. For your
kindness, conversation, trust, porch time, and so many bowls of ice cream. Without you this
project and its continued life beyond OHMA would still be that seed of an idea from so many
years ago.

To Mum & Dad and the gang: For your unwavering belief, your support, your love, and your
humor. A mere shout-out here cant even begin to articulate my gratitude for all that youve
given me. But: I think a good place to start is to thank you for teaching me to be kind and to be
brave, and for teaching me the mantra I think I can, I think I can, when I was learning to ride a
bike. It still applies.

To my Pop: For blessing us kids with both small and tall tales (the tellings of which I sorely
miss), and in whose living room, after an afternoon of chats, I googled Masters in Oral History
and stumbled upon OHMA.

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown?
Good Lord, show me the way!
-George H. Allan in the Slave Songbook of 1867, as performed by
the Young Fiddlers of Madison County in March 2017 in Marshall, N.C.

A mountain stream is a chord of many notes strung out stereophonically across the path of the
attentive listenerthe rivers of the world speak their own languages
-R. Murray Schafer
Soundscapes: The Tuning of the World

Enclosed files:
Just Go Ahead and Lay Me Down, pt.1: Hot Springs Soundscapes
Just Go Ahead And Lay Me Down, pt.2: Meet Your Narrators

Sound and Place

A few weeks before I finished my OHMA coursework, my friends and I went to see Doug

Wheelers PSAD Synthetic Desert III at the Guggenheim. By creating a floating room-within-a-

room, Wheeler aimed to replicate the empty soundscape of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona.1 The

immersive exhibit glowed a dim blue. Sound-absorbing foam spikes jutted from all surfaces. The

light play seemed to beckon to infinity. We laid on the floor, as directed, in silence. But still: I

could hear a ringing in my ears and the thump of my heart. Diane Ackerman, poet and naturalist,

writes in A Natural History of the Senses, John Cage once emerged from a soundproof room to

declare that there was no such state as silence. Even if we don't hear the outside world, we hear

the rustling, throbbing, whooshing of our bodies, as well as incidental buzzings, ringings, and

squeakings.2

Its true: we cant escape sound. Hearing is arguably the most intimate of the five senses.

It draws the world inward, subtly tactile in the way sound is absorbed into our bodies through the

rhythmic waving of the cilia in our ear canals. Sound physically touches us. Hearing is our first

sense in the womb, and is thought to be our last active sense when we die. There is no soundless

place. The Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the most desolate places in the world, is all but quiet;

its sonic environment is comprised of raging windstorms, the scuttling of insects, and a small but

growing tourist economy.3 And even in outer spacelong thought the be a sound vacuum NASA

has found a way to hear the planets sing by converting intercepted electromagnetic waves.4

1
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/arts/design/desert-silence-transposed-to-the-cacophony-of-new-
york.html?mcubz=1&_r=0
2
Ackerman 191.
3
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/destinations/south-america/chile/explore-chile-atacama-desert-
stargazing/
4
https://www.pcmag.com/feature/353576/10-creepy-sounds-recorded-in-space-by-nasa/5

1

 Where ever we go, for as long as we go, we will always be enveloped by soundscapes,

defined by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer as a combination of particular sounds that make

up an environment. In the study of a given soundscape, Schafer, one of the worlds pre-eminent

acoustic ecologists, directs us to pay particular attention to sounds that may possess archetypical

significance in the context of that environment. A loss of these sounds would be disorienting to

the community to which they belong. Schafer highlights the importance of soundmarks, a term

derived from landmark that refers to a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities

which make it specially regarded or noticed by people of that community.5 He proposes that such

sounds may have imprinted themselves so deeply on the people hearing them that life without

them would be sensed as a distinct impoverishment. They may even affect the behavior or life

style of a society.6 Natural examples of soundmarks include geysers, waterfalls, and rivers. Man-

made examples include the call prayer in Istanbul, tornado sirens in the American heartland, and

the fog horns of Nova Scotia.

Studying soundscapes can also tell us how a community has changed over time. The

absence of the shouting of town criers, for example, can inform our understanding of urban

industrialization (here we reflect on the advent of printing presses and telegraphs and telephones);

the booming locomotion of railways and runways tells us about evolving mobility and

transportation infrastructure (gone are the days of horses and buggies, and mammoth passenger

steam ships). In actively listening to a placewhether urban and wild, densely populated or

desolateone can begin to understand the meaning of its physical geography, built environment,

and culture.

We must investigate why the sounds of spaces and places are integral to the practice of oral

5
Schafer 10.
6
Schafer 10.

2

history. In this paper, I reflect upon my fieldwork in Hot Springs, N.C., and argue for the necessity

of including soundscapes in oral history archives. If oral history is history according to those who

lived it, conveyed through the aurality of their recorded voices, it is important for us to hear where

they lived it.

One hundred years before my visit to western North Carolina, ballad collectors Cecil Sharp

and Maud Karpeles traveled from England to Appalachia, recording mountain ballads across the

region. As per the practice of the time, their recordings were destroyed after transcription. Though

one can learn something about mountain living through the written expression of these songs, the

meaning in their aurality has been lost: the subtext given by vocal inflection, intonation, cadence,

and ambient sounds. I wondered if a life could truly be contextualized without evidence of the

environment in which it was experienced. I wondered what was lost in this omission.

The 2009 version of the Oral History Associations best practice guidelines say, Unless

part of the oral history process includes gathering soundscapes, historically significant sound

events, or ambient noise, the interview should be conducted in a quiet room with minimal

background noises and possible distractions.7 The latter part of this point defines the industry

standard for controlling an environment for sterility; the former part has been largely collectively

neglected in practice. It is ironic that the quality of oral history audio recordings themselves often

leave something to be desired; one can often here the rustling of lavalier microphones or a notable

distance of the narrator if external microphones arent used. I want to reframe the way we think

about the incorporation of non-narrator sound. I argue that through collecting soundscapes in

conjunction with interviews for the archive, practitioners can create primary source sonic artifacts

that further contextualizes the life narrative; they can create mnemonic devices to be used in future

7
http://www.oralhistory.org/about/principles-and-practices/#best. Italics mine.

3

interview encounters; and they can create raw material that may be used by sound artists for public-

facing projects.

Auralitys Potential in Recording Practices

The intersection between oral history and ethnography is evident: an undercurrent of

documentary urgency runs through both practices. Yet, while oral historians put the emphasis on

the encounter of the formal one-on-one interview, traditional ethnographers gather a broader, more

sweeping view of a population. Traditional oral history is driven by an archival impulse;

ethnography, to produce anthropological research.

From its inception, Thomas Edison envisioned the phonograph as having the capacity to

save sound from cultural oblivion. Edison, like Allan Nevins, founder of Columbia Universitys

Center for Oral History, was in favor of recording the best that is thought to have been said in the

worldour Washingtons, our Lincolns, [and] our Gladstones.8 Namely, the elites. In the same

time period, anthropologists began to take their cumbersome recording equipment into the field,

documenting culture through language, song, and ritual. Yet, academic ethnography continued to

privilege the written text as the final means to convey knowledge gained orally in the field.

In Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience, the first

book ever to explore audio documentary as a research method, Daniel Makagon and Mark

Neumann speak to the historic premium put on written text vis--vis audio recordings. They note

that even oral historians, a group of scholars who work directly with sonic recordings, never

8
Makagon and Neumann 7.

4

seemed to find an appreciation for the actual recorded sound of their subjects.9 They suggest that

most researchers and historians have found transcriptions easier to use than recordings. Upon its

invention, Edison had insisted that the phonographs virtue in historical documentation would be

the preservation of mens memories in their own voices. But, as evidenced by our own archive,

through the early 1960s Columbia University (among others) routinely destroyed the original

recordings following their transcription.

Yet, at the same time Nevins was busy at Columbia, Tony Schwartz was working in other

parts of New York City to create an audio portrait of Puerto Rican immigrants. Makagon and

Neumann illustrate,

Here are some children playing in the street, so he records them and has one of them describe how the
game works. Schwartz goes to the airport to record the voice of the announcements of flight arrivals
over the public address system. He makes recordings of the sounds of these immigrants learning to
speak English.10

Schwartz recorded from 1945-1953, collecting sounds that would otherwise have been difficult to

convey in print. Today, it is common practice for ethnographers to gather the ambient sounds of a

community (and keep the tape), as ethnography often seeks to create a holistic portrait of a

community; this is not standard oral history practice. Our maxims dictate a quiet sitting space,

ideally, with refrigerators unplugged and air conditioning units off. Or perhaps a conference room

without the buzz of florescent lights. Always with windows closed. A successful, professional oral

history archive, traditionally, lacks intentional, informative sonic density.

Oral historians Alessandro Portelli and Charles Hardy III, however, queered this practice

with their revolutionary essay-in-sound, I Can Almost See the Lights of Home: A Fieldtrip to

Harlan County, Kentucky. Portelli, a literature professor in Rome, and Hardy, a radio producer,

9
Makagon and Neumann 7.
10
Makagon and Neumann 11.

5

sound artist and historian, collaborated to create a new genre of oral history using the tape from

Portellis twenty-five years of interviews in coal country. He took up Hardys challenge: You talk

about oral history: how about presenting it aurally?

In I Just Want to Click and Listen, oral historian Doug Boyd of the Louie B. Nunn Center

for Oral History at the University of Kentucky speaks to one of his formative audio experiences

while working with folklorist Henry Glassies tapes from Ballymenone, Ireland:

I remember the very moment when I pressed the space bar on my digital audio workstation to hear the
newly digitized recording. I distinctly recall Hugh Nolans voice, his accent, his laugh, his cough, the
meow of his cat, the rhythm of the clock, the stroke of the wooden match. Suddenly, the words flew
from the page and transformed my meaningful engagement with the story. I could almost smell the
smoke from Hugh Nolans pipe.11

Hardy and Boyd, in so many words, both recognized the importance of attending to acoustic

ecology. The meaning of Nolans narrative would have been less animated sans the cats meow

(Was it friendly? Agitated?), clock ticking (Did it keep the right time? How often did it strike?),

the match scrapes (Were they all lighting pipes? A hearth fire? Gas lanterns?). Environmental

ambience lends a prismatic effect to a lifes telling.

So Portelli and Hardy got to work. In a 2.5 hour piece that is divided into an introduction,

eight chapters, and a final movement, they layered interview tape with ambient sound in service

of atmosphere; they included their own dialogue about Portellis experience in an effort to consider

alternate modes of presenting interpretation, including modes that render the very act of

interpretation more visible while preserving and respecting the integrity of primary sources.12

Hardy was integral in asking Portelli to stretch his practice. To cook in sound, says Hardy, we

need the human voice, natural and human soundscapes, sound markers, music, and sound

11
Boyd 80.
12
Boyd 78.

6

events.13 He emphasizes, Once one thinks of the interview as a sound event, a precious sonic

artifact, as a dramatic performance, the tools that one uses to capture the soundsas accurately as

possible, become very important The move into aural history [and audio art] broadens oral

historians responsibilities.14 Hardy calls for oral historians to treatand interpretsoundscapes

as historical documents unto themselves.

Acoustic Ecology in Service of Oral History

The field of acoustic ecology found its genesis in R. Murray Schafer and his team at Simon

Fraser University in the 1960s. Schafer problematized what he saw as the incredible dominance of

the visual modality in society. He believed that childrens listening skills were rapidly

deteriorating; he began advocating for the inclusion of listening skills as part of the national

curriculum. He wanted to teach people to listenas one must learn to do as an oral historian, of

courseand to document what they heard. If oral history is history according to those who lived

it, acoustic ecology could be considered of type of aural history, i.e. history where it was lived.

The two fields are linked, and can be further investigated as intersecting and at the service of other

disciplines. We see evidence in the form of numerous creative projects that demonstrate the ways

in which aural history can now be of service to the landscapes themselvesanalogous to the best

practices of oral history in which we return our co-authored material to our narrators. For example,

Yellowstone National Park has partnered with Montana State Universitys Acoustic Atlas project

to house both interviews about local ecology and respective soundscapes in one archive. With the

13
Hardy 150.
14
Hardy 161.

7

help of radio producers, these works aim to educate the public about environmental news,

concerns, and phenomena, while create a cache of material for biologists to study.

Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology is rife with examples of the inter-

relationship between sound, nature, and society. After a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and ensuing

tsunami decimated the eastern coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, Professor Koji Nagahata at

Fukushima University decided to record soundscapes in order to better illustrate aspects of the

aftermath that he felt the mass media was not reporting on. In What Should the Soundscape

Community Do When Listening to the Soundscapes of Fukushima? he explains,

I believed such soundscapes could become a clue for others to learn what a nuclear power plant accident
actually meant to the sufferers: knowing is the first step to action. Thus, I decided that the main purpose
of the project would be to let people all over the world know about the soundscapes of Fukushima after
the accident, as well as how they had changed, and still continued to change.15

From his recordings, he was able to glean information about both the environmental and social

health of his community. Imagine the value that these recordings would hold in conjunction with

oral history testimonies about the disaster akin to the profound documentation executed by

Svetlana Alexievich in Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. In a more

light-hearted turn, authors Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood wrote The Soundscape of

Burning Man, a report on their process of documenting the annual arts festival in Black Rock

City, Nevada, utilizing studies of sound, architecture, and interviews with festival goers.16

15
Nagahata 15.
16
Moore 42.

8

An Oral History of a Geography

When I first arrived in Hot Springs, I wanted to create what I was calling an oral history

of a geography. I wanted to find out how place was integral in shaping the narratives of peoples

lives. The concept of place has various meanings across disciplines. Here, I use geographer Yi-

Fu Tuans definition of place-making from Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception,

Attitudes, and Values: What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it

better and endow it with value.17 Upon encountering a space, we witness its physical geography

and hear its history and lore. This space then becomes a place as it is imbued with memory and

meaning through routines and rituals; through trauma and celebration; through navigating both

everyday life and radical experiences. In A Space for Place in Sociology, Thomas Gieryn writes,

Places are doubly constructed: most are built or in some way physically carved out. They are also
interpreted, perceived, felt, understood, and imagined (Soja 1996). A spot in a gathering of physical
stuff there, becomes a place only when it or utopia, danger or security, identity or memory. In spite of
its relatively enduring and imposing materiality, the meaning or value of the same place is labile
flexible in the hands of different people or cultures, malleable over time, and inevitably contested.18

In essence, a place is a living entity that is subjectively experienced by no two people identically,

yet contains shared, communal meaning.

The town of Hot Springs has a population of about 600 people. The town counts both

founding families and outsiders among its residents. It sits in the cradle of the Appalachian

Mountain region and is home to one of the worlds oldest rivers. Both geologic featuresthe

mountains and the riverare important local sources of economic activity, civic identity, and

pride. One of my narrators, Heather Hicks (sixth generation Madison County, N.C.),

anthropomorphized the French Broad River as a woman. She identifies herself as a river person

17
Tuan 6.
18
Gieryn 465.

9

and her family as mountain people. She reads the rivers sounds as if reading text:

I always describe that feeling of this town as metaphysical. Its something I cant put my finger on. Its
something I can feel sometimes, like when I said [to you earlier], Lets walk to the river. Thats my
soul place. And I know in science what this river isthat it is the third oldest river in the worldbut
what it is to me is my ancestors, it is the same water that they touched. It literally sings songs and tells
stories. And thats the only way I can describe it. And I think people from here have that sensehave
those soul places and spots which are beautiful and protected by the community.19

For another narrator, Sally Lassiter, the Hot Springs soundscape couldnt be more satisfying:

And you knowwhat a blessing, to live beside this creek and it just changes! You know, weve got
everything here: weve got the sun, and weve got the earth, and weve got fires down there, weve got
that water coming by, and weve got these bugs makin all this noise, and weve got birds and trees!
And [sigh]and we can grow things! What a glorious place.20

Both of my narrators cite sonorous events that make up home as they know it. As Makagon and

Neumann write, Listening more closely to the sounds in public and private spaces can produce

richer and more complex engagements with, and representations of, the people and places

studied.21 Subtract the river (What can you tell about the health of the land by the way the river

runs?), the bugs (What season is it? What time of day?), the cracking fires (Are they man-made?

Are they forest fires?) and birds (How do they caw? Do they sing? What is indicated by their

silence?), the land that my narrators love would be unrecognizable to them.

Gesturing to Schwartzs work in New York City, and the theories of Makagon and

Neumann, I ask: What can be learned about social hierarchy and cultural currencies by overhearing

summer raft guides in Hot Springs share blood-and-guts stories about navigating the French Broad

19
Heather Hicks, God Forged in Fire & Flood: An Oral History of a Geography, an oral history conducted 2017 by
Robin Miniter, Columbia University, archived at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History in Lexington, Kentucky
20
Sally Lassiter, God Forged in Fire & Flood: An Oral History of a Geography, an oral history conducted 2017 by
Robin Miniter, Columbia University
21
Makagon and Neumann 29.

10

River? What is indicated about the town now that the train whistle blows only once a day? Can we

learn anything about local mobility and economics now that the old drovers roadonce used to

drive cows, pigs, even chickens from Tennessee to South Carolinahas been replaced by

Highway 25/70? What does the dining room sound like at the Sunnybank Inn, where Sharp and

Karpeles conducted their recordings a century ago, during peak hiker season? In the middle of

March, what can the sonic environment of frozen riverscape teach us? What truths about the

experience of life are heard in lightning cracks atop bare mountain balds, or in the rush of water

rising as the river floods? How does one hear a season change? How can the way one talks about

a place become more densely imbued with meaning with the addition of creek-side and grave-side

recordings? How would Sharp and Karpeles recordings have helped us understand the passage of

time in this place, if only the wax cylinders had survived?

In addition to their value as primary source documents, soundscapes can also be utilized as

mnemonic devices in oral history encounters. Place-based recordings work to reanimate a location

in the imagination of the narrator, providing alternative stimulationmuch like a photograph

wouldto the interviewers direct line of questioning. Ideally, an archetypical or familiar

soundscape will provide opportunity for a narrator to explore their memory and identity in a

reflexive way. In an unconscious way, a sound may elicit reminiscences that direct question could

not. Imagine a Columbia University student in 2067 listening to students from 2017 describe the

scene at 116th and Broadway; imagine them being able to listen to the sounds of that intersection.

Do car mufflers sound the same? Are the same brothers running the Halal standand if they are,

can you hear the years in their voices? If you walk two blocks to the west, does Riverside Park

sound the same? Perhaps a narrator in 2067 could record their own observations and comment

11

upon the archival tape made in 2017. One can imagine the richness of dialogue between these

voices and settings, in conversation across the distance of all those years.

The Digital Age of Oral History: Why Soundscapes, Why Now?

In his 2007 paper Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History, Alistair Thomson

writes that new technologies are transforming the ways in which we record, preserve, catalogue,

interpret, share and present oral histories.22 He notes that oral historian Michael Frisch argues that

the digitization of sound and images will challenge the current dominance of transcription and

return aurality to oral history, and thereby extend our text-based literacy with sound and

image.23

What Thomson does not interrogate here is the genre in which these oral histories will

appear. In the 10 years since his paper was written, the digital revolution has made oral historys

recording and dissemination more accessible than ever before. Where oral historians and

ethnographers once labored with heavy recording equipmentSharp and Karpeles, for example,

ferried enormous boxes of those fragile wax cylinders that could only record for five minutes at a

timetoday, we have the ability to carry mobile recording booths (handheld recorders, smart

phones with recording capacities) in our pockets. Today, we have a plethora of microphone shapes

and sizes to choose from, depending on the necessities of the job. Binaural microphonesone of

the most exciting developmentshave opened up a world of sound-capturing possibilities. Using

two ear-shaped microphones, the incoming sound waves are altered in a manner reminiscent of

22
Thomson 68.
23
Thomson 68.

12

human ears, giving the effect of a 3D immersion for the listener.

This technological revolution has given rise to new genres of oral history and continues to

democratize sound-recording practices. The Louie B. Nunn Center has developed OHMS, open-

sourced software that renders online audio searchable via transcripts, tags, and indexes. Oral

historyboth archival and contemporarynow appears on the likes of Radio Diaries and This

American Life, just two of the programs recently bolstered by the current public radio renaissance

and podcasting revolution. Hardy identifies in the medium of radio an exciting potential to explore

the construction of memory, the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee, and

sociological considerations of gender, class, and race.24 We are seeing multimedia artistic

experimentations in the utility of recordings beyond the archive and outside of academic circles.

For example, sound walksself-directed tours created through a blend of oral history and

soundscape, and accessed through headphonesare becoming increasingly popular, appearing in

greater frequency as smartphone applications.

Hardy suggests that multi-channel aural histories provide a means of sharing authority,

privileging multiple rather than univocal perspectives, and opening spaceusing simultaneity and

dimension in the presentation of history that is not possible in the printed word, bound as it is to

the linear unfolding.25 Through the words I have italicized, I want to highlight in particular the

spatial nature of Hardys argument. He calls for the creation of a more dynamic archivethrough

the use of better sound-recording equipment, practitioner training towards aurality, and the

intentional gathering of neglected soundsto situate narrators in time and listeners in a place.

24
Hardy 400.
25
Hardy 398.

13

Notes on My Process

When I first arrived in Hot Springs, the link between acoustic ecologies and oral history

had yet to crystalize for me. When articulating my intention to create an an oral history of a

geography, I anticipated documenting the ways in which people framed and gave meaning to

considerations of being from this specific place. Because I came to OHMA as an aspiring radio

producer, my trained instincts told me to gather as much ambient material as possible, and to gather

as much good tape as possible. Upon my first visit to Hot Springs in March, I felt internal conflict:

I had committed to archiving with the Louie B. Nunn Center at the University of Kentucky, yet I

knew that a collection of sit-down, life history interviews were not the only aim of my project. I

wanted to make an audio documentary. I didnt think there was space in an oral history archive for

interviews that werent executed according to my formal OHMA classroom training. So I thought:

perhaps I can do some interviews for the Nunn Center, and the rest of the material can go to my

project.

When I arrived in town, I started to record everything. I always had my mic visible, hanging

from the gear bag slung over my shoulder. I accepted offers to have lunch at the diner, to drive

through the mountains, to visit to homes, churches, family cemeteries, to a fiddle festival (Ive

listened to my live recording of Down to the River every time I need to get back into the flow

of this project). This was the texture of life that I wanted to gather. When I returned home from

my first trip, I created an oral history concept album and listening bar11 tracks cut from my

collection of interviews intended to paint a picture of life in this placefor our OHMA spring

2017 showcase. When I returned to Hot Springs the following July, my interest in life had evolved

to an interest in deathfor one cannot talk about dying without talking about what it has meant to

live. I began to study the economy, ritual, and folklore surrounding death in Southern Appalachia.

14

 This interest was informed by Sally, one of my key informants-turned-friends, who, at 68

and with stage IV breast cancer, is actively preparing to die. I started to develop a line of

questioning and interviewing folks involved with the matters of death. Sally and I eventually sat

together and made recordings at her gravesite, on her porch, and in her living room about her life

and impending death. She told me stories, sang songs, and said prayers. She schooled me a little;

she teased me a lot. From this tape, I initially made two audio documentary pieces. However, none

of her tape made it into my final audio documentary collage for OHMA. She is deserving of her

own soapbox. I landed on the final documentary formseen here as Just Go Ahead and Lay Me

Downwhen I began to again interrogate the makings of this place that initially attracted me:

the mountains, the river, the Appalachian Trail. As a producer, how did they appear in my own

mix? With my narrators speaking so much about this landscape, how did I let the landscape speak

for itself? Thats when I came to realize the answer to my project framework lay in the field of

acoustic ecology as both a research methodology and tool complimentary to oral history. This, I

realized after I left Hot Springs. So, in this piece you hear, some of the scenes have been recreated.

We meet Zach, our 16-year-old gravedigger, in the diner. While it is true thats where I interviewed

him twice, I actually interviewed him in different parts of the restaurant: once on the porch, and

once in a back room. To situate him in the dining room of Smoky Mountain Diner was an artistic

choice meant to evoke the image of one of the most important gathering spots in the community

(also, the place where he works in the kitchen and his grandmother, Geniaalso heard here

owns). Every work of documentary is a little bit of fiction; every bit of oral history is colored by

ones subjectivity. The best we can do as oral historians and documentarians is to show our hands.

I will be back in Hot Springs in the fall of 2017. This thesis, to my surprise somedays, has

manifested in a number of outcomes, including the design and implementation of a community-

15

run oral history project at the town library. Having come to these realizations manifested in this

paper, Im looking forward to embracing sound collecting as a valuable activity in and of itself.

In her article, Wayback Sound Machine: Sound Through Time, Space and Place

intermedia artist Maile Colbert walks the St. Michaels Way in Ireland and muses,

I began to wonder what this path may have sounded like back in the time of thieves and pirates, back
when its soundscape was composed of shared occasions celebrated with the voices of people, priests,
prayers, and populated markets and fairs along the way that ignited all this activity What if as you
walked this path, you could listen to time spinning back, listen to how it might have sounded, listen to
its history?26

I do believe that oral historians can take cue from Schafer, Hardy, Makagon and Neumann in

thinking about our practice in collecting a lifes story. Oral historians need to begin considering

place as an animated character in and of itself, and find waysthrough the gathering and curation

of soundscapesto treat the sounds of place as a defining force that needs to be reckoned with in

the formation and re-formation of both individual and collective history.

26
Colbert 22.

16

 Works Cited and Referenced

Acoustic Atlas: Montana State University Library. Acoustic Atlas: Montana State University
Library, acousticatlas.org/.

Sunday Feature, Folk Connections: Cecil Sharp's Appalachian Trail. BBC Radio 3, BBC,
2016, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06yp4cv.

Blofson, Katharan M., "Master's Project: Interval Out Loud: A Place-based Oral History Project"
(2014). Rubenstein School Masters Project Publications. Paper 1.

Boyd D.A. (2014) I Just Want to Click on It to Listen: Oral History Archives, Orality, and
Usability. In: Boyd D.A., Larson M.A. (eds) Oral History and Digital Humanities. Palgrave
Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York

Colbert, Maile. Wayback Sound Machine: Sound Through Time, Space and
Place. Soundscape, vol. 13, no. 1, 2013, pp. 2124., wfae.net/journal/scape_18.pdf.

Feld, Steve, and Donald Brenneis. Doing Anthropology in Sound. American Ethnologist,
Volume 31, Issue 4, Nov. 2004, pp. 461474

Gieryn, Thomas F. A Space for Place in Sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 26, 2000,
pp. 463496. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/223453.

Hardy III, Charles. (2009). Painting in Sound: Aural History and Audio Art., 147-167. Retrieved
from http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/hist_facpub/14

Hardy III, Charles. (2014). Adventures in Sound: Aural History, the Digital Revolution, and the
Making of I Can Almost See the Lights of Home: A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky.
Oral History and Digital Humanities, pp. 53-75

Hardy III, Charles, and Alessandro Portelli. I Can Almost See the Lights of Home: A Field Trip
to Harlan County, Kentucky. The Journal for MultiMedia History, 1999,
www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol2no1/lights.html.

Makagon, Daniel, and Mark Neumann. Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the
Ethnographic Experience. Sage, 2009.

McHugh, Siobhn. The Affective Power of Sound: Oral History on Radio. The Oral History
Review, Volume 39, Issue 2, 1 July 2012, pp. 187206

Moore, Stephan and Scott Smallwood. The Soundscape of Burning Man. Soundscape, vol.
11, no. 1, 2011, pp. 47-51., http://wfae.net/journal/scape_16.pdf

Nagahata, Koji. What Should the Soundscape Community Do When Listening to the
Sounds of Fukushima? Soundscape, vol. 12, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1519.,
wfae.net/journal/scape_18.pdf.

National Parks Service. Natural Sounds (U.S. National Park Service). U.S. Department of the
Interior, www.nps.gov/subjects/sound/index.htm.

Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World. A.A. Knopf, 1977.

Thomson, Alistair. Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History. The Oral History Review ,
vol. 34, no. 1, 2007, pp. 4970.

Tuan, Y. (1974). Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and

Values. Columbia University Press.

 Well, God willing and the creek dont flood.
Have you ever heard that saying?
Thats what you tell someone when they say, see you next time.
Sally Lassiter, Hot Springs, N.C.