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Former Slaves Tell Their Stories in New Library of Congress Audio Presentation
Recordings Offer Firsthand Accounts Online
The Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center will soon make available audio recordings of nearly two dozen former slaves who were interviewed between 1932 and 1975.
“Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories” will be available on the American Memory collections Web site on Jan. 16, 2004, at www.loc.gov/memory.
This is the Library’s first online collection featuring audio recordings made of people who experienced slavery firsthand, providing the unique opportunity to listen to them describe their lives in their own voices. These interviews capture the recollections of 23 identifiable ex-slaves born between 1823 and the early 1860s. Several of those interviewed were centenarians.
The nearly seven hours of recordings were made in nine Southern states and provide an important look at what life was like for slaves and newly freed people. The former slaves discuss how they felt about slavery and slaveholders; how they were coerced; their families; and, of course, freedom. As part of their testimony, several of the ex-slaves sing songs, many of which were learned during their enslavement.
This presentation complements other American Memory collections, most notably “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938,” which contains transcripts of more than 2,300 interviews with ex-slaves. However, unlike the transcripts, which sometimes represent the collectors’ interpretations rather than verbatim reproductions, these recordings present the actual interview and offer the unique experience of hearing the ex-slaves’ voices with their various inflections and regional dialects.
In addition to the recordings and transcripts, “Voices from the Days of Slavery” also includes biographies of many of the interviewers, including such notables and playwright Zora Neale Hurston and folklorists John and Ruby Lomax and their son Alan. A special presentation called “Faces and Voices from the Collection” and a related resources section are also available.
The American Folklife Center was created by Congress in 1976 and placed at the Library of Congress to “preserve and present American folklife” through programs of research, documentation, archival presentation, reference service, live performance, exhibition, public programs and training. The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, which was established in 1928 and is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the United States and around the world.
American Memory is a project of the National Digital Library Program of the Library of Congress. Its more than 120 collections, which range from papers of the U.S. presidents, Civil War photographs and early films of Thomas Edison to papers documenting the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements, Jazz Age photographs and the first baseball cards, include more than 8.5 million items from the Library of Congress and other major repositories. The latest Web site from the Library is the monthly “Wise Guide” (www.loc.gov/wiseguide) magazine, which demonstrates that “It’s Fun to Know History.”
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http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2004/04-01.html
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I've been interested in all aspects of Black History in the US for a long time &
the Library of Congress has a veritable wealth of pertaining information.
Born in Slavery
This collection has written accounts from interviews of former slaves.
It also has photos in several formats - low/mid resolution .jpeg
& high resolution .tiff (these weigh on average 19mo). They are worht downloading for
the quality is excellent & more importantly the faces of these people are wonderful.
I have most of them which I downloaded & converted to 100% jpeg.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html
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Here is a page of related links inside & outside of the LOC :
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snrelated.html
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In the meantime - for listening here are some links from an interview with
Fountain Hughes whose Grandfather was 'owned' by Thomas Jefferson.
http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/former_slave/ (this is in real player format)
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/HUGHES1.HTML *
This has the transcript as well as several wave files.
I used one of them in an audio track I did called 'Conform'.
I'll re-up it to the music box if anyone is interested.
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* part of the American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology site
From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life. Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery in North America, allowing us to explore some of the most compelling themes of nineteenth-century slavery, including labor, resistance and flight, family life, relations with masters, and religious belief.
This web site provides an opportunity to read a sample of these narratives, and to see some of the photographs taken at the time of the interviews. The entire collection of narratives can be found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79).
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/wpahome.html
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Also - for some nice sound recordings of Blues & Gospel,
the "Now What a Time" is excellent :
"Now What a Time": Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943 consists of approximately one hundred sound recordings, primarily blues and gospel songs, and related documentation from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort Valley, Georgia. The documentation was created by John Wesley Work III in 1941 and by Lewis Jones and Willis Laurence James in March, June, and July 1943. Also included are recordings made in Tennessee and Alabama (including six Sacred Harp songs) by John Work between September 1938 and 1941. These recording projects were supported by the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center). Song lists made by the collectors, correspondence with the Archive about the trips, and a special issue of the Fort Valley State College student newsletter, The Peachite: Festival Number, are also included. One interesting feature of this collection is the topical rewording of several standard gospel songs to address the wartime concerns of the performers. This online presentation is made possible by the generous support of The Texaco Foundation.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftvhtml/ftvhome.html
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfshtml/vfshome.html
