Toward Theory and Method with the Jazz Oral History Project

Abstract

Oral history, as a relatively young field, offers pleasures and challenges as we try to learn something from the perspective, discursive style, and the reminiscences of a respondent and occasionally try to figure out the motivations of an interviewer. That oral history is so young is reflected in the discussions about what function it serves, what methodology it should follow, and whether or not it should be ascribed the status of a discipline ancillary to research in history and culture. We can agree that oral history is an approach to historical events and personalities offering valuable insights into social history, the anecdote, chronology, and factual detail. We can verify suspicious details or the unknown; we gain a sharper focus on work conditions, travel and accommodations, technology and inventions; and we obtain descriptions of littleknown but important figures contemporaneous with the subject personality being interviewed. Oral history is history first, provided subjectively by an individual who experienced a historical period first-hand, a reminiscence guided by a sympathetic student of history to be preserved through sound reproduction and storage and ultimately to be transcribed in order to preserve the raw material of the oral history as its goal. Of all the professions, the literary and performing arts have received much attention from journalists and cultural historians because artists combine the workings of the intricate, the mysterious, and the seemingly esoteric processes of imaginative creations with peripatetic and spectacular lifestyles. Musicians, painters, and poets are perceived as social outcasts and therefore make good copy. In any given issue of a daily newspaper the public is more likely to read a brief biography of a writer or musician than of a political figure or entrepreneur. Jazz, categorically spanning classical, pop, and ethnic musics, is the foremost of all these musics in American journalism and aesthetic analysis. No sooner had the word jazz come into usage in the media than a New York journalist in 1919 interviewed conductor and orchestra leader James Reese Europe for an explanation of this music and word (Vernon 1919). With the publication of installments in the Saturday Evening Post during 1925 and later in book form of orchestra leader Paul Whiteman's