Authoring in Sound:

An Eccentric Essay on Aural History, Radio, and Media Convergence

Charles Hardy III

West Chester University

January 1999

(Draft, not for quotation, distribution or use without permission of author)

My thanks to Charles Hardy for permission to distribute this to all class members. References to audio files on an accompanying CD are now links on the Syllabus.

Introduction (January, 1999)

This study began out of frustration and curiosity. Trained as an historian I labored throughout the 1980s as an independent documentary producer and historical consultant. Much of my work was in public radio, for which I produced two oral history-based documentary series and served as the first producer of Crossroads, a national weekly radio magazine on multi-cultural affairs. Self taught, like so many radio documentary producers, I soon became so discontent with both my own work and the general quality of radio documentaries that I began to search for models. I also moved into the field of “audio art,” producing sound montages from oral histories, archival recordings, and other sound elements that permitted me to push the boundaries of my own conceptions. After becoming a full-time academic historian in 1990, I began to research the history of the sound documentary using aural reminiscences, both to figure out how the field evolved, to explain why, in my opinion, the radio documentary had never lived up to its potential, and to locate seminal works that actually held my interest and that might inspire other academics to work in sound. My primary audience at that point, was oral historians, whom I wanted to convince of the importance of recording high-fidelity interviews. [1]

What in the early 1990s seemed a rather esoteric study, of interest to only a very small and specialized group of oral historians and public radio documentary producers, has now, perhaps, become less obscure, for the authoring of history in sound is coming of age with the ongoing digital revolution. Liberated by digital field recorders, work stations, and expanding “ancillary” markets, the spoken-word sound documentary has entered a period of renewed creativity and vitality. A host of other independent documentary producers are creating programs that demonstrate the beauty and utility of aural reminiscences presented in sound. American non-commercial radio continues to air ambitious sound documentaries. Indicative of growing importance of electronic media, the Oral History Association (OHA) in 1998 revised its professional guidelines to acknowledge the importance of recording high-fidelity interviews and the proper storage and preservation of the sound documents. Each year the OHA annual meeting hosts a growing number of media sessions, and biannually awards a prize for the best work in non-print media. The most recent winner, the Southern Regional Leadership Council’s(?) Will the Circle Be Unbroken , (1997) was a series of 13, 1/2 radio programs that documented the Civil Rights movement in five southern towns.

The growing appreciation of history in sound can be seen clearly with the debut Lost and Found Sound: An American Record, a new national series produced by veteran radio documentary producers, Kitchen Sisters. Debuting on NPR in January, 1999, Lost and Found Sounds is a national collaboration of radio artists, producers, sound designers, record producers, musicians, filmmakers, composers and others who are producing a “millennial audio anthology;” stories and pieces that “explore how recorded sound has captured history, how sound recording has changed the course of history, and how the sound of life has changed over the past century.” An ambitious project of short segments and long-format programs that will be aired on some of NPR’s most popular programs, its producers will also be asking public radio listeners to search for and share their own families’ audio histories .[2]

To produce spoken-word programming that holds its own against print, television, and other media, academics, journalists, and other authors must listen to and learn from to the best of these works. In other words, they need to learn how to think in sound. Throughout this paper I will use the word “author” rather than “write.” I do so not an academic pretension, but to distinguish between writing, which is done on paper, and the processes by which one communicates effectively in sound. Words written down and then read aloud rarely do good radio make. “Radio,” too, is a word that is losing its utility. During the past century the technological triumph of motion pictures, recorded sound, radio, and television brought about monumental changes in the nature of human communications. Today we are in the midst of a second, digital revolution that is laying the groundwork for an international and interactive information infrastructure in which once separate media are already converging; a celestial jukebox in which information will be recorded, stored , transmitted, and received digitally. What this means for the nation is that more and more people will be generating documents about themselves and receiving information about the world, past and present, in multi-media formats. From the 1920s through the 1980s radio was the dominant electronic medium of spoken-word communication, (the limited market for spoken-word records and tapes I address elsewhere), but in the 1990s it lost its monopoly. Today, radio is but one outlet for spoken-word programming that can be distributed in a growing variety of media and formats: CDs and cassettes, the Internet, CD-ROMs, sophisticated digital repeaters that permit many levels of interactivity, and a host of multi- and multiple-media combinations. [3]

To author the history of the twentieth century, authors working in digital media need usable records; documents that accurately reproduce the sound and visual events that they recorded. Increasingly affordable technologies today permit sound gatherers to record high-fidelity interviews and sound documents, and to convert those materials into sound and multimedia "articles,” "books" “documentaries,” “pieces,” exhibits, and still emerging forms of “programming” that can be released in a variety of stand-alone and multiple media formats. Targeting car drivers who want alternatives to the fare offered them by both commercial and non-commercial radio, the Books-on-Tape industry exploded in size during the 1990s. At first most books-on-tape were like old wine poured into new bottles; written words read aloud. But the industry has slowly begun to develop an ear. More and more publications are paying attention to production values , utilizing actualities, sound effects, and ambiances. Today one can find autobiographies read by their authors, dramatic recreations, and publications that include archival recordings. Claybourne Carson’s excellent print biography of Martin Luther King, for example, when released as a book on tape (•• 1999) included archival recordings of King speeches that date back to the 1950s.

Such publication permit authors to use print and sound in a complementary fashion, playing to the strengths of each medium. A collaboration of scholars, artists and technicians at four different institutions, Remembering Slavery (The Free Press, 1998), for example, combines a book of slave narratives with two, one-hour tapes that include the words of former slaves read by actors and oral histories recorded during the 1930s. Produced by Smithsonian Productions these tapes were also broadcast by NPR in 1998. Here radio broadcast also served as marketing and promotion for the New Press book-and-audiotape publication.

The 1990s witnessed a growing number of similarly ambitious multiple-media publications. A collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and NPR, Wade in the Waters: African-American Sacred Music Traditions included a 26-hour radio series, traveling museum exhibit, four-cassette music anthology packaged with an 115-page Educator’s Guide (NPR 1994), and musical recordings released on cassette and CD by Smithsonian/Folkways. To tell the story of the exciting literary movement of the American Southwest, University of Arizona English professor David Dunaway produced Writing the Southwest , a complementary book (Penguin, 1995) and radio series that included thirteen, half-hour radio documentaries.[4]

Television broadcasters and video documentarians also use sound recordings. The explosion of new broadcast and non-broadcast outlets has created a voracious demand for spoken-word programming. In the 1990s the communications and entertainment industries recognized that the nation’s libraries and archives are a major, under-utilized source of inexpensive “software;” raw material to help fill the expanding universe of electronic space. Swamped by requests from network and cable channels, A&E, independent documentary producers, and website designers, growing numbers of sound archives are setting up rate schedules and retooling their reading rooms to accommodate the growing number of researchers. [5]

Quick to embrace the computers, academics first learned to author in the digital domain in the 1990s. Joining the soaring numbers of high-quality video and sound documentaries are multi-media monographs that team text, documents, still and moving images and audio recordings. A superb example of things to come is The American Social History Project's Who Built America, the 1993 CD-ROM that incorporated several thousand pages of text, hundreds of high resolution photographs, sixty graphs and charts, four hours of audio--including oral histories--and forty-five minutes of film. That a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal found the oral histories with ordinary people "some of the most fascinating entries" indicates the ability of oral histories to hold their own against other visual and audio-visual materials. This came to life for me while listening to a segment on composer Eubie Blake, who while talking about his early musical education plays a song as his music teacher taught it to him, and as he "ragged" it on his own. In 1995 Voyager commissioned the American Social History Project to produce a second volume of Who Built America? covering the period from 1914 through 1945 that will include even more oral histories and other sound documents. [6]

A growing number of oral history projects are finding their way onto CD-ROM and the Internet. One of the first significant oral history projects committed to the digital domain was undertaken by the Rasmusson Library Oral History Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In the mid-1990s the Program created a series of innovative, interactive computer workstations that teamed interviews with native elders with pictures, maps, text, and short video clips that highlighted local history. Historians working on this Jukebox Program quickly experienced how authoring in multimedia alters the way one thinks about history; how it led them to "think beyond individual interviews to the corpus of comparative perspectives which we are assembling... In a sense,” William Schneider wrote, “we resemble orchestra conductors encouraging many voices and variation and sometimes are able to leave our listeners with lasting impressions of what went on, what it was like, and what we think it means." [7]

Ongoing improvements continue to transform the Internet, a digital domain with which many scholars are already quite comfortable. The arrival of CD-quality, high-fidelity sound streaming to the Internet may prove to be the most revolutionary development of all. Users can already listen to the radio, music, and other sound programming over the Internet. Opportunities for journalists and academics abound. Debuting in 1998, the Journal forMultiMedia History (JMMH) became the first refereed academic journal to appear on-line. Able to publish “articles” that include text, still and moving images, and sound, the JMH in May, 1999 will publish I Can Almost See the Lights of Home: A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky, (Charles Hardy and Alessandro Portelli). a 2hr.21min. stereo, oral history essay-in-sound authored as a scholarly study that must be heard rather than read.

Museums that experimented with sound installations in the 1970s and 1980s often experienced nagging problems with the cart machines and other analogue tape technologies then available. These were expensive, high-maintenance, low-fidelity technologies that broke down with great regularity and that required periodic replacement of tapes. Walking tours were limited by the lock-step, linear character of the programming and the requirement that each user carry a cassette recorder, tape, and headphones. Today, solid-state digital repeaters and multi-channel, computer-based digital processors have the potential to revolutionize the use of sound in museums, exhibits, battlefields, towns, and other locations. Storing the sound programming on a memory chip, digital repeaters are practically maintenance free. Information that can be presented in multiple languages, at different levels of expertise--such as for children or adults--and in sequential segments, at the end of each of which the listener can choose to go to one of four subsequent messages. Branching permits each listener to select his or her own individual pathway through the stored information, listening to as much or as little as is desired. A light-weight portable pointer that activates each sound station with the press of a button replaces the cassette player.

The replacement of individual cassette players, with their fixed, linear programs by wands that activate interactive repeaters, can revolutionize the audio walking tours already popular with museums and visitors. Audio walking or driving tours are ideal not just for history museums, but historic parks and districts, and the sites of important historical events. Imagine, when visiting the City of Birmingham, Alabama, for examine, being able to walk through an historic site such as the Schloss Industrial Furnace, your tour narrated by former workers who describe the steel making process, labor issues, life stories, and significant events, or listening to audio walking or driving tour composed of oral histories, news reports, music, and the sounds of the crucial moments of the Civil Rights during the spring and summer of 1963. [8]

The only way to really experience the potential for the use of oral histories in audio tours, is to listen to one. Alcatraz: Cellhouse Tour, a half-hour, self-guided, audio walking tour used at the National Park Service's Alcatraz prison museum in San Francisco, might be a good place to start. Former Correction's Officer Tom Donohue serves as the narrator, leading the visitor through the prison and introducing the voices of prisoners and guards, all residents of Alcatraz between 1934 and 1963, who describe their daily routines and recall the most bloody prison break and only successful escape. The producers make excellent, spare use of the sound of cell doors shutting, footsteps on hard pavement, and other effects to punctuate the recollections and stories about individual cells, the library, mess hall, and solitary confinement. The Alcatraz tour also makes effective use of complementary media, including panels of historical photos and portraits of the informants to whom the visitor is listening or about whom they are hearing. Available for rent or purchase, Alcatraz: Cellhouse Tour demonstrates an effective, cost-efficient use of oral histories for audio tours. (Selection)

Stereo is only a poor analogue of the way we actually hear. New three-dimensional sound systems, already being marketed for use with computer games, may also revolutionize the whole world of sound reproduction, enabling authors to work in multi-channel, three-dimensional soundscapes that enable sophisticated positioning and movement that brings sound to life. [9]

Three-Dimensional Sound:

In selecting their oral history excerpts, the most historians, filmmakers, and other media professionals are not especially concerned with sound quality. Beggars cannot be choosers, so recordings, if intelligible are usually deemed usable. Few oral historians pay serious attention to sound quality. Most don't understand its importance. Museum professionals, too, are only now beginning to use audio stations as more than a multimedia gimmick to entertain easily distracted visitors. Many exhibit designers have told me that program segments should be no more than 90 seconds long, both to keep traffic moving and because visitors won't listen any longer than that. And why should they when segments are poorly written and produced, the high frequencies have been accentuated to increase the intelligibility of audio listened to in noisy spaces on low-fidelity telephone receivers?

If aural history is to hold its own against history presented in other media, good sound is essential. Ongoing breakthroughs in hi-fidelity stereo and three-dimensional sound provide aural historians the tools they need to make sound come alive. Psychoacoustic research on how people hear and perceive different types of sound waves, is providing manufacturers the information they need to design a whole new generation of digital sound systems. Convinced that new multimedia computers playing enhanced CDs will enhance sales, the large entertainment corporations producing popular music and computer games are pioneering the advanced sound systems and sophisticated speakers technologies. Computer games are pushing further innovations in sound as a means of taking players "inside" their games through the use of surround sound and multi-channel sound systems. A number of companies are working on surround sound and 3D sound systems that place the player inside a three-dimensional sound space and bring the games to life auditorially. Computer makers are already packaging superb close-proximity speakers, very small speakers that produce high fidelity sound at low volumes. Altec Lansing has already introduced a new generation of wireless surround-sound speakers which will be controlled by personal computers.

To bring sound to life manufacturers are also introducing a series of competing technologies, with names like Spatializer, Gravis, QSound and SRS (Sound Retrieval System), a playback only process that works with any sound system, stereo or mono. An SRS-equipped audio playback system, such as your home stereo, takes a sound, processes it, and plays it back through two normal speakers with added spatial breadth, thereby overcoming the limitations of traditional stereo, which works most effectively when one is located in the "sweet spot" where audio from the two speakers mixes best. SRS claims to deliver full sound throughout the room. SRS cannot "place" sounds in a three-dimensional audio field. The ability to give sound placement and movement is offered by QSound, a new speaker system which by using mathematical models of how people hear and interpret sound, produces audio that creates the illusion of three-dimensional sound with only two speakers. QSound Labs technology brings this sound-placement capability to PCs. Another new system, Surround Sound, offers hardware capable of sending separate sound signals to four or more separate speakers, thereby providing 360 degrees of virtual audio sources. Microsoft Corp. is working with Dolby Laboratories to produce new high fidelity, multi-channel sound systems that will use up to five separate speakers. [10]

Multi-channel installations and performance pieces

The ongoing innovations in sound technology that will soon enable authors to present their work in three-dimensional sound are tremendously significance. We have all experienced the opening of sonic space that takes place when one shifts from monaural and stereo sound. A visual analogy might be movement from black and white to color. A single, monaural sound source offers information about distance, but little about position. Stereo creates a limited two-dimensional effect, enabling limited linear movement, some information about position, and separation between direct and background sounds. It still, however, presents a listener only a facsimile of the three-dimensional soundscapes we hear in real life. Ongoing innovations in multi-channel sound processors, advanced sound systems, and speaker design will soon replace stereo with "three-dimensional" sound. We are standing on the edge of a revolution in audio technology that will quite literally add another dimension to aural history.

Three-dimensional sound has tremendous potential for museums. High fidelity, multi-channel sound installations and sound environments presented through multiple speakers bring a space sonically to life, moving sounds through and around the listener. To date, zoos have shown the greatest interest in multi-channel sound installations, using them to recreate the sounds of tropical rainforests and other natural environments. The potential is as great for historical museums. Through the use of four or more independent channels and speakers strategically positioned, one can create sound movement through and around a gallery space. A horse-drawn trolley, for example, could pass right through the middle of the room or a conversing couple pass by the visitor. A steamship could move slowly from left to right along one wall, while one hears a team of black longshoremen singing work songs in the distance, a hushed conversation along the other wall, and a flow of aural reminiscences describing the place and time emanates from different exhibit cases in the room. Interactivity, here, is created not by a button or switch but by physical movement, thereby giving the visitor a sense of control and discovery otherwise missing. (This is much the same as what one does when listening to or moving among conversations at a party). And again, such a sound environment, could be experienced differently each time the visitor returned to that space. For those, such as younger visitors, with only a casual interest in content, the experience of a well designed three-dimensional sound environment could be a tremendous attraction, drawing them into the substance of the exhibit. (Remember, too, that higher fidelity permits greater intelligibility at lower volume) [11]

The use of three-dimensional sound and multi-channel installations leads to the question of what a truly "aural history" would sound like. How would an audio history "book" or "article" be composed and structured? How could the different sound elements be juxtaposed and blended to best effect? What system of cues and markers would give the listener the ability to efficiently scan, locate and sample?

In traditional historical studies we have the written document: the word. In the traditional museum we have the material artifact: the object. In aural history we have the spoken word and the sonic artifact: the sound. A good museum exhibit, like an arcade or child's room offers choices, enabling visitors to determine their own course through the exhibition. Using the arcade or museum exhibit as a model, the listener within such a space should be able to move freely among the mix of sound elements that most attracted his or her attention. Such a sonic display would, like a piece of good music, provide the listener the ability to follow the instrument of choice: to create their own mix. As Glenn Gould's Solitude Trilogy has demonstrated, all the voices need not be understood in a single pass, just as all the display copy and exhibition pieces need not be looked at in a strict sequential manner. What could be more tedious? How many people take in an exhibit in such a fixed and linear way?

The implications for the understanding and presentation of history are also intriguing. Perhaps multi-channel aural histories represent an important tool for the authoring of "post-modern" histories by providing a means of sharing authority, privileging multiple rather than univocal perspectives, and opening space; using simultaneity and dimension in the presentation of history that is not possible in the printed word, bound as it is to a linear unfolding. One of the constant challenges historians face in the college classroom is to disabuse their students of the notion that history is fixed; that one interpretation is true and all others false. Perhaps multi-channel aural histories can assist in loosening this linear worldview. Perhaps they will remain nothing more than a failed experiment or academician's pipe dream. But as historians we do know that motion pictures, television, the phonograph and radio, and other new communication technologies have all been treated at first as novelties, their power to transform recognized only later.

So authors already have an extraordinary range of broadcast and non-broadcast media in which to present their work: radio and television, audio and video cassettes, books on tape and CD; CDs and tapes with print supplements, and websites. Museums can now present highly interactive sound and multimedia programming through high fidelity solid-state interactive digital audio repeaters and multi-channel, computer-based digital processors. All these wonderful new digital technologies have one thing in common: they require high-fidelity, and preferably stereo recordings.

The ongoing digital revolution is rapidly accelerating the democratization of sound recording, production and distribution. In the era of open-reel analog tape technology, sound documentary production was an esoteric craft practiced by few competently, and even fewer with skill. Today one can produce high-fidelity interviews with equipment that costs under $400, and can author sophisticated multi-track, broadcast-quality sound documentaries on a home computer with digital audio workstation software (DAWs) that costs even less. If sound programming is to hold its own against works in print, and still and moving images, however, authors are going to need to learn how to think and to author in sound. For these reasons, then, a history of the sound documentary using aural reminiscences may prove useful to journalists, scholars, and others who would author in sound.

So why, then, if authoring in sound offers scholars, journalists and others such wonderful opportunities, have so few learned the grammar and syntax of sound media? Three reasons come quickly to mind: the print biases of academics, the marginality of American radio as an educational medium, and potential authors lack of exposure to quality sound productions. Most Americans think of sound documentaries, when they think of them at all, as the poor cousins of video and film documentaries: tv shows without the visuals. Conceived as such, audio documentaries offer little to potential creators or users. And, indeed, most audio documentaries do little to dispel this misconception. The vast majority continue to be fashioned according to presentational formulas borrowed from print and moving-image broadcast journalism (movie newsreels having helped create the model followed by radio and television journalists). They thus tend to be formulaic, inappropriately “written” and voiced, and sonically unengaging. Since most of their producers are trained, when trained at all, in other media, it would be unrealistic to expect anything better. [12]

Underfunded and relegated to the extreme ends of the radio dial, educational and public radio have always been overwhelmed and rendered practically invisible by American commercial radio and television; what media historian Erik Barnouw has called the “American system of commercial-sponsored broadcasting.” As a result few people have heard the exciting audio works produced during the radio renaissance of the past quarter-century; a renaissance made possible by steady improvements in audio field-recording and production technologies, and the debut of the National Public Radio in 1971. What I would like to do now, then, is present a brief history of the aural-reminiscence-based sound documentary, explaining how radio producers have attempted to solve the problems of voicing, contextualization, analysis, and storytelling that emerged when one moved from print to radio. The best way to do this is not just to discuss programs that offer useful models of how to author in sound, but to also listen to excerpts that illustrate and bring this analysis to life. [13]

(Most of what follows was written in 1995. As a result the following study does not include an analysis of more recent sound pieces that have much to offer as models.)

Modes of Presentation

Having made the determination to record broadcast-quality interviews and enter the electronic age, the next step is to share one's work with others not only in print, but in other media. Although video or film generate the greatest public interest and audiences, audio media offer an affordable and equally valuable forum for the presentation of oral histories. What happens, then, when the oral historian's chosen mode of presentation shifts from print to sound? Without getting into the controversial and disputatious tangle of media theory, one can begin with the simple recognition that we experience the world differently through the ear than through the eye; differently through the electronic media than through print. The ear has a different aesthetic than the eye, an aesthetic that very few oral historians or even documentary producers, all but a few of whom have been trained and based in the primarily visual media of video and film, have explored.

Media theorists and those who work in sound have long recognized the unique attributes of sound presentation. While print tends to flattens, simplify, and standardize voices, resulting in the loss of essential information and vitality, radio and other forms of sound presentation utilize the mind's ability to create visuals that are often more compelling and engaging than the real thing. A well recorded voice standing alone tends to draw people in and is intimate in a way that film and video are not. Aural presentation may also shift the power relations between the oral historian and the narrator in that the narrator speaks in his or her own voice--it is the actual sonic imprint of the author's authentic voice which is heard. There are also strong economic and pedagogical reasons for oral historians to work in sound. Americans spend more time listening to their radios and tape players than reading weighty historical monographs or articles. With production costs only a fraction of those for television or film, audio documentaries can enable oral historians with limited financial resources reach large audiences with their work and ideas. A final reason to present one's work in sound is that it is a wonderfully creative and satisfying medium in which to work. 6

An Eccentric and Highly-Opinionated Essay on the History of the Sound Documentary Using Aural Reminiscences

Even as they were perfecting their new recording technologies, Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner recognized the importance of their inventions for the preservation for posterity of the voices of the great men and women of their era. A handful of academics and record companies began to record folk music and oral reminiscences as early as the 1890s. But such research remained limited by the high cost and technical limitations of the available recording technologies. The development of both the phonograph and radio was shaped by their ability to serve as consciousness industries carrying the promises and appeals of modern consumer capitalism. Early radio pioneers' utopian visions of both media as mechanisms of universal public education soon withered beneath the onslaught of popular music, formulaic fiction, and advertisements. [14]

Aural reminiscences recorded on phonographic disc and broadcast over radio did reach the national airwaves by the early 1930s in a series of syndicated programs which included interviews with prominent Americans. Recognizing that recorded programming was a cost-effective way to reach local radio audiences, Chevrolet commissioned production of the Chevrolet Chronicles, which first aired in October, 1930, as part of a national advertising campaign. Each half-hour program, hosted by World War One flyer Eddie Rickenbacker, presented the personally narrated experiences of prominent American war heroes. Enormously successful, in part due to their quality recordings and high production values, the Chevrolet Chronicles spawned a number of imitators. Early in the 1930s, however, the major radio networks colluded to keep all recordings off the air, a decision purportedly made to protect artists but implemented, in fact, to increase their control of content. The new prohibition not only ended the use of syndicated recordings then in competition with the networks, but also shaped the sound of American radio during its "golden age." It also inhibited the development of an actuality-based audio documentary tradition. Although the equipment to make recordings that could be broadcast within minutes of their creation was available by 1930, the networks did not lift their ban until the end of the decade. The network ban made coverage of the news especially difficult. Not only did it prevent the broadcast of any programs that wished to use excerpts of recordings with prominent leaders, be they alive or deceased, but it also prohibited the broadcast of all recorded presidential addresses! (The same policy also figured prominently in NBC's decision not to record historically significant live broadcasts, as it was thought that they would never be rebroadcast on the network!) [15]

The broadcast ban of recorded materials forced radio news, public affairs, and documentary producers to rely upon dramatic recreations to tell their stories. As far as most Americans were concerned, the radio documentary really began with appearance of The March of Time, radio dramatizations, or "dramatic documentaries" as they were called, of lead stories in Time magazine, that debuted on CBS radio in March, 1931. New media are habitually treated as extensions of the old. The producers of The March of Time combined the drama of radio theater with a journalism time-tested in print and film that relied on vivid storytelling to hold audience attention. A compelling mix of current events and dramatic storytelling, the program was enormously successful and for years considered the apex of radio showmanship. Emerging during the so-called "Golden Age" of radio, The March of Time also became the prototype of the radio documentary formula, introducing the disembodied "voice-of-doom" narrator who provided exposition and set the stage for the actors’ performances. American radio documentaries for decades to come would remain locked in the aesthetic conventions associated with this program and this "golden age" of American broadcast history. [16]

After the sudden success of Amos and Andy in 1929 demonstrated the potential of radio as a mass medium for advertising, investors began to buy up broadcast licenses and many of the small town, low-budget community and college stations that had sprung up in the 1920s went off the air. By 1938 only 48 of 202 licensed educational stations remained on the air. Corporate dominance of the American System of Broadcasting limited the presentation of history by and large to safe, sanitized, and celebratory visions of an Anglo-American past. Programs such as the DuPont sponsored Cavalcade of America, produced by the prestigious Batten, Barton, Dursteine & Osborn advertising agency, tended to be tributes to some great American hero or heroine. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Library of Congress did in the 1930s developed a number of programs dealing with social problems in America. A handful of documentarians, perhaps the most notable of whom were John and Alan Lomax, produced pioneer programs on the nation's cultural heritage. By and large, however, programs on African-Americans, labor history, and the role of women outside of a limited range of achievements were strictly taboo. As a result, the work being carried out by folklorists and historians working in sound, such as the interviews with former slaves recorded by fieldworkers in the Federal Writers Project, never found their way onto the nation's airwaves. [17]

The network ban on the use of recordings began to erode in the late 1930s, paving the way for the emergence of an actuality-based radio documentary. The recording of announcer Herb Morrison's anguished description of the explosion of the German dirigible Hindenburg, at Lakehurst New Jersey in 1937 was simply too compelling to keep off the air. Orson Welle's epoch Halloween "trick" the next year, the legendary The War of the Worlds broadcast, not only led to a network ban on the use of simulated news broadcasts in dramatic programming, but also to the use of dramatic techniques in news programs. The network ban on the broadcast of recordings finally ended during World War Two. The public desire for news from the front was met by reports from journalists' in the field, who filed their reports not only live, but also on portable disc recorders and newly introduced optical film and magnetic wire recorders. Eric Severeid parachuting with troops into Burma, Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts from London, and George Hick's wire-recorded reports on D-Day from the deck of a ship and then from the beaches of Normandy electrified Americans, bringing the war into people's homes and revolutionizing American broadcast journalism. Able to bring news from the front to Americans almost instantaneously, radio challenged print journalism as the nation's most important source of news and information. Sixty-one percent of those responding to a poll in 1946 indicated that radio was their primary source of daily news. [18]

The same year CBS set up its first documentary unit armed with state-of-the-art, analogue, reel-to-reel tape recorders. Developed by German engineers during the war, these improved analogue tape recorders represented the most important breakthrough in audio technology since the invention of the vacuum tube in the mid-1920s. This new technology would have a profound impact not only on popular music, but also as an adjunct to the democratization of mass communications that would mark the second half of the twentieth century. Improving on German machines captured during the war, American companies began to market affordable reel-to-reel tape recorders in the late 1940s. Although they were heavy and bulky, often the size of small suitcases and weighing thirteen to thirty pounds, the new reel-to-reel tape recorders inaugurated a revolution in broadcast journalism by enabling easy splicing and editing without the sound degeneration produced from the dubbing necessary in disc editing. Post-war producers could for the first time create sophisticated and multi-layered sound documentaries by mixing down from two or more pre-recorded tapes onto a mastering machine. Armed with the new technology, network journalists for a brief time turned their attention to domestic issues, producing documentaries, such as ABC's Slums and CBS's The Eagles Brood on juvenile delinquency, both broadcast in 1947, that were often critical of the inequalities in American life. The same year witnessed the debut of CBS Is There, dramatic recreations of events drawn from ancient to modern history that used CBS correspondents as on-the-spot narrators of historical events. Renamed You Are There in 1948, the program enjoyed a popular three-year run. Hear It Now, another CBS program produced by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly made perhaps the most significant and ambitious use of the new documentary style. Using the new analogue tape technology Hear It Now was able to create "pictures for the ears," bringing the voices of newsmakers into American homes and covering modern history from 1932 to the present. [19]

NBC entered the documentary field in 1948 with Living, a series of programs dedicated to "showing America to itself," which also made extensive use of taped interviews. In Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, which ran from May through October of 1951, NBC News and Special Events Department presented "issues out of the past, problems of the present and prospects for the future," including a three-part series on narcotics, a documentary on professional baseball, and a program entitled Country Fair, in which field engineer George Robinson brought the Bangor, Maine state fair to life via his tape recorder. Some of the NBC programs also utilized old recordings, such as the August 5, 1951 program built on recordings of famous, deceased American poets reading their works. [20]

By the early 1950s an actuality-based radio documentary formula had emerged in the United States, a formula that has undergone comparatively little change from that date to the present. The emergence of television as the new in-home storytelling medium during the same period had briefly allowed radio documentarians to delve into more controversial and "adult" issues. But network produced public affairs programming did not last long. Documentary historian A. William Bluem's summary of its brief history is worth quoting at length.

In the six years, then, between the end of the war and the final demise of a national radio service which had dominated the American scene for a quarter of a century, the interaction of various forces within radio, together with technological advances and a constant pressure of example form the documentary film movement, had brought the radio documentary to its most faithful expressions in the dramatic interpretation of reality. From experience gained in earlier experiments, it had evolved an authentic and dramatic form of journalistic documentary, dealing with the crises of the world as they continued to arise. It had worked forward from dramatic restatement of fact to drama made with fact. It had presented information in a compelling form on numberless major and minor issues and problems confronting the American people. It had evolved a special combination of drama, journalism, and education in a successful presentation of history. And as it did all these things, it gave a legacy to television which had begun, by the early 1950s to assume radio's role as the dominant mass medium of this nation. [21]

Television quickly replaced radio as the nation's primary news and story-telling medium, drawing off the money and creative talent at the same time that reel-to-reel tape was revolutionizing the American audio documentary. This brief era of reform-minded journalism ground to a halt during the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War. Commercial radio's public information programming was quickly restricted to presentation of hourly headline news reports, sandwiched between top-forty music and a dwindling flow of special features to local affiliates and subscribers. Television, as Bluem noted, had "absorbed" the documentary role of radio. As a result, network-based producers failed to take advantage of the technological breakthroughs that have transformed audio production since the Second World War. The radio documentary quickly became the "forgotten art." [22]

American Educational Radio and the Early Sound Documentarians

To understand the subsequent history of the radio documentary one must turn from the United States to Canada, Germany, and England, countries whose state-sponsored, public service broadcasting systems were built on the premise that their audiences could be led to "higher" standards of taste and outlook by presenting them a mix of serious and popular programming. Free to broadcast pre-recorded materials, it was the Europeans who pioneered development of the audio documentary. German radio producers had begun to think seriously about the potentials of radio as a storytelling medium back in the 1920s. Hoping to develop an imaginative literature or "radio art" produced expressively for the new medium that would turn the absence of visual stimuli into an aesthetic advantage, Hans Flesch, Hans Bodensteedt, Bertold Brecht, and other young writers and intellectuals challenged "normal" radio conventions by introducing unexpected interruptions, sound effects, and distortions to demonstrate the magical aspects of the new medium and experimented with "sound portraits" of cityscapes. "We need to fashion not only a new medium, but a new content as well." Flesch, the founding director of the Berlin Radio Hour, wrote in 1929. "Our program cannot be created at a desk." In accord with Flesch's manifesto, Bertoldt Brecht began to create a series of original works for radio in which he sought to break patterns of passive, "concert" listening by insisting on audience choral recitation and engagement of the radio listening audience in debate about social issues. The Germans also developed what they called "acoustical films," a plot-oriented radio literature the sophistication of which leapt forward in the 1930s when the acoustic strip on sound films enabled the cutting and manipulating of stored sounds more precisely and predictably than ever before. Viewing broadcasting as a national asset which should be used for the public good, the BBC in Britain also began to develop a radio documentary tradition, using recordings of events for delayed or repeat broadcast for the first time in 1931. By the late 1940s BBC radio programming picked up on short wave radios or heard on Canadian stations whose signals carried into the northern United States presented American listeners who could hear it a refreshing alternative to American offerings. [23]

Inspired by British and Canadian programming, radio documentary producers in the United States survived at small, volunteer-staffed educational radio stations, the preponderance of which were based at the old land-grant colleges and state universities of the Midwest. (A handful of these stations, such as WHA and WOSU, were well-funded and professionally staffed.) Educational radio throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century remained America's "hidden medium." Envisioning radio as a invaluable tool for universal education, early radio pioneers had allocated certain frequencies for educational stations since the late 1910s. Despite the grand expectations and predictions, educational radio never became firmly established in the United States. Plagued by inadequate funding and driven to the ends of the radio dial by the commercial stations which quickly swallowed up most channels, the nation's handful of educational radio stations offered a mix of lectures, practical information, and college courses for credit.

The Great Depression and defeat of the Wagner-Hatfield Bill in 1934, the last major challenge of the American system of broadcasting, brought about the near collapse of educational radio in the United States. The Broadcasting Act of 1934 did set aside a small percentage of frequencies for non-profit use, but by 1940 less than thirty stations survived, most broadcasting only during daytime hours on low-power licenses. Those that did survive formed a loosely affiliated network which operated under the umbrella of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. The development of FM during the World War Two gave educational radio a new life. Faced with growing public opposition to the monopolistic chain broadcasting system dominated by CBS and NBC, the FCC in 1940 forced NBC to divest its "Blue" network, which became ABC, and reserved five channels of the new FM band for non-commercial use. Pressured by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) and continued public criticism, the FCC in 1945 assigned twenty of 100 frequencies to non-profits, in large part to develop an FM broadcasting system that was still a nonentity and that showed no commercial potential. Three years later the FCC liberalized its broadcast rules, licensing low-powered 10-watt stations to encourage development of the college FM stations. In the Midwest some of the land-grant stations thrived on their new FM bands. The University of Wisconsin’s WHA aired . programs on science, the arts, music, social sciences, and agriculture, complete with teachers manuals. Land-grant universities in Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois and other midwestern states created similar networks. Here educational radio continued to scatter seeds of knowledge and culture to America’s rural population. Despite these efforts, however, educational radio throughout the 1940s and 1950s remained marginal, at best. Surveying the state of educational radio Dorothy F. Greenwood in 1952 would write of "the depressing history of educational broadcasting," and the "almost universal disregard of the vast educational potentialities of the communications media which have emerged in the past half century." [24]

Despite the obstacles, educational radio did grow in the post-war period by providing information and entertainment to segments of the American public historically ignored by the networks. The Wisconsin State Broadcasting System, the nation's largest and best funded educational system, by mid-1965 included with two AM and nine FM stations. There, and at stations like WHA in Madison, WUOM in Ann Arbor, Michigan, WOSU on Columbus, Ohio, and WOI in Ames, Iowa, financial support was consistent enough to enable a handful of producers to scrape out a living in educational radio and to continue producing audio documentaries, some of them using oral reminiscences. Aided in the 1950s by a tape distribution service run by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB), the quality of productions gradually improved. University of Minnesota radio station KUOM, alone, received thirty-five broadcasting awards between 1940 and 1952 . [25]

Collectors of Endangered Sounds and Information

The introduction of affordable magnet tape after World War Two not only revolutionized radio production, but also made it possible for people of moderate incomes to record endangered sounds and recollections, thereby democratizing the process of sound collection. At the same time, historians' expanding use of the new recorders to fill the growing holes in the historical record created by modern communications and transportation technologies lead to the growth of the field of oral history. Folklorists used the machines to document the music, stories, and games being transformed or driven into extinction by the mass media and a nationalized mass consumer culture. Radio documentary producers used the technology to create "sound portraits," a new documentary form that abandoned the old "voice of doom" narrator in favor of stories told through sound and a growing array of voices. From the 1940s through the 1960s, these would all emerge and grow as separate, parallel worlds with little interpenetration. Not until the late 1970s would these different groups begin to recognize common interests and agendas.

Perhaps the most important of the American post-war sound documentarians was sound hobbyist Tony Schwartz, whose fascination with history and folk music led him to record urban folklore and soundscapes. Schwartz bought his first wire recorder in 1946, then switched to tape in 1947. Armed with a twelve-pound Magnemite recorder and a microphone strapped to his wrist, Schwartz traveled the streets of New York recording street songs, children's games, huckster cries, and other sounds he found of interest. (Schwartz was fortunate to record at a time when many people still made their own music on the streets and in their homes.) In the mid-1950s Schwartz began to produce and release his recordings on the innovative Folkways label, producing records on children's games, and the experiences of New York's Puerto Rican immigrants. Approached by WNYC to produce a program built around the question of "What can a person living in, or visiting, New York hear?" Schwartz spent two months editing and assembling Sounds of My City: The Stories, Music and Sounds of the People of New York, released by Folkways Records in 1956. [26]

Sounds of My City reflected Schwartz's fascination with the sounds of everyday life and the music of ordinary people. On Side 1 he presented "the voice of a city," as he called it, introducing the listener to a broad range of natural and man-made sounds, including songs, snippets of street conversations, the sound of rain and subways, and of people making music, among them Moondog, the great New York street musician and composer who played to the accompaniment of fog horns in New York harbor. On the second side Schwartz assembled a brief soundscape of the city over a twenty-four-hour period recorded from the window of his apartment that included the sounds children singing play songs, teenagers making music, and a street vender hawking Parker pens. By bringing the sounds of daily life to the foreground of awareness, Schwartz was able to make listeners appreciate sounds that by reason of their ubiquity had been previously invisible. Magnetic tape enabled Schwartz to record and re-package these sounds in such as way as to make people hear their rhythm and beauty. As a plumber Schwartz recorded repairing a sink in his apartment noted, without music there would be no happiness in life. For drawing attention to this "universal rhythm that pulses throughout the city." Schwartz was awarded a Prix de Rome in 1956. [27]

Tony Schwartz was a collector of endangered sounds, not a journalist or oral historian. (A woman giving a loving description of her favorite cat--which had died in 1929--provides the only segment about memory.) But his work did have relevance to the first generation of tape-recorder-wielding oral historians in how it suggested, early on, the importance of sounds as historical artifacts and the potential of the ear as a significant sensory organ through which to engage in the study of history. In the aftermath of the World War Two, historians, too, were coming to recognize the potential value of the new reel-to-reel analogue recorders to fill in the growing gaps in the "written" record. In a story by now familiar to most, if not all oral historians, Allen Nevins recorded his first interview on a wire recorder in January, 1949, and within a short time had switched over to a less cumbersome and more reliable tape recorder. Coming from a discipline in which "truth" was closely associated with the written word, Nevins used his tape recorders primarily as dictation machines until audiophile and record collector Dr. Victor Whitten--a friend of Schwartz--finally persuaded him to preserve the recordings. But with tape expensive, and oral history projects, then as now, poorly funded, the reuse of previously recorded tapes remained a common practice among American oral historians for years to come. [28]

The first person to seriously bridge the worlds of "oral" and "aural" history was Canadian radio producer Imbert Orchard, who in the early 1960s began to record and preserve “endangered sounds,” and to produce a series of radio documentaries based upon oral reminiscences of western Canadians and Canadian Indians. Much of the best radio documentary work produced during the 1950s and 1960s continued to come out of the government-sponsored British and Canadian broadcasting systems, which put sufficient money into radio to allow their producers to create more ambitious programs than could their American counterparts. Able to make a living in public radio, some of these producers worked in the medium long enough to develop a "sound," or style of production that made ambitious use of ambiances and sound effects. One of the most influential of the new radio documentary series to feature the life stories and voices of working-class people was Radio Ballads, a BBC series of musical radio documentaries produced between 1957 and 1964 by English folklorists Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger with BBC producer Charles Parker. Based upon hundreds of hours of interviews, each program interwove storytelling, folk songs, and vernacular speech that featured the rich, natural voices and language of uneducated British workers. [29]

Orchard continued the tradition of Radio Ballads with his work in "aural history" and what he called the "document in sound." He began in the early 1960s to record oral histories of rural Canadians and Native Americans throughout British Columbia. Interweaving recorded sounds and voices with running commentary and historical reenactments, Orchard attempted to create evocative sound pieces that made extensive use of oral histories. Recognizing the value of his sound recordings as documents of living history worthy of archival preservation, he also helped establish the Aural History Division of the Provincial Archives in Victoria, British Columbia. Better known among oral historians than radio producers, Orchard's programs still have devoted fans. I find his documentaries somewhat conventional in voicing and approach. River of Clouds, for example, which many consider one of his best pieces, follows a traditional radio documentary formula, making extensive use of a formal male narrator and a prose that reads better than it speaks. Nor does it make particularly creative use of sound to help contextualize or tell the story. Nonetheless, Orchard did bridge worlds and produced a series of ambitious oral history documentaries that demonstrated to many oral historians the importance of sound and the potentials of radio presentation. [30] (CD: Selection 1)

More successful in his search for a form that better utilized the new technology--and better fit a democratizing society--was Chicago journalist Studs Terkel. After dropping out of law school in the 1930s Terkel had written radio scripts on great artists for the Illinois Writers Project and worked as an actor in radio dramas before embarking on his career as a Chicago journalist. By the late 1950s he was host on classical radio station WFMT of The Wax Museum, a morning program that presented interviews, musical and dramatic presentations, and sound documentaries. A self-professed technophobe who never learned to drive a car, Terkel traveled the world with an old Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder, recording, as one commentator put it, "extraordinary interviews with remarkable people." From these and interviews conducted live for The Wax Museum, he produced a series of innovative radio documentaries and best-selling books based on aural reminiscences, including Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, the 1970 best-seller that marked Terkel's arrival as a major voice in American oral history. [31]

One of Terkel's best early radio documentaries was Born to Live, an hour-long program that asks what one should do between the time you are born and the time you die in a world threatened by nuclear annihilation. Bracketed between a Japanese woman's recollections of the dropping of the bomb on her hometown of Nagasaki, Terkel allowed an illustrious multicultural and interracial cast of scientists, writers, and artists, among them Pete Seeger, Simone De Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Miriam Makeba, William Sloan Coffin Jr., Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Sean O'Casey, to contemplate the meaning of life, the moral decisions, and the awesome challenges confronting humankind in the nuclear age. Rather than focusing on dark scenarios of gloom and destruction, their thoughts uplifted and inspired, providing, as a reviewer for the Chicago Daily News put it, "a theme of affirmation for a discouraged modern society." Determined to keep the listener's focus on the words rather than his informants' celebrity status, Terkel left each speaker anonymous. Only in the end credits did he acknowledge the contributors. Listing the names of speakers, singers, and musicians without comment, he gave equal weight to each's contributions and worth: effectively conveying his own belief in the equality of all. Released by Folkways five years before publication of Hard Times, Born To Live demonstrated compellingly how spoken words and poetry, music, and sound effects gave people's words an immediacy and brought their meaning to life in a way that could not be duplicated on the printed page. And Terkel did this making only very spare but effective use of musical bridges and beds, fade ins and fade outs, and other radio production techniques. [32]

Terkel was one among many radio producers at educational and non-commercial radio stations in the 1950s and 1960s who were experimenting with the new forms of voicing and production made possible by analogue tape. Few had his skills or extraordinary range of informants. And most of the audio documentary productions of the 1950s and 1960s, broadcast only locally or distributed through a fledging educational radio system, were quickly bulked or dumped in a closet where they were quickly forgotten. It is clear, however, that a number of radio producers producing programs based upon extensive oral history interviews. Radio producer Ralph Johnson, for example, working at WUOM in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1966 produced The American Town: A Self Portrait, a series of seven, one-hour programs "drawn entirely from the remembered past" on seven small American towns. Armed with a Nagra, Johnson spent four to five days in seven different towns in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Kentucky, conducting more than one-hundred extended oral history interviews with elderly residents, and producing a series of audio montages, or "spoken histories" that evoked the life and history of seven communities. Johnson, like most radio documentary producers at the time was inventing the a sound as he went along. (Like most radio documentary producers, too, he failed to preserve his original interviews.) Influenced by Canadian broadcasts and borrowing the technique of montage from film documentaries, Johnson chose to create these pieces without the use of a narrator. To do so he spent days in the studio experimenting with the layering of sounds and voices using a battery of reel-to-reel playback decks. Johnson's impatience with the "voice of doom" narrator which dominated America commercial broadcasting and his fascination with the voices of "common" people places him clearly in a collective transatlantic movement. [33]

Pacifica and the Resurgence of the Long-form, Social Documentary

A second source of innovation emerged during the 1950s on the West Coast. During the 1960s the most extensive American use of aural reminiscences on radio was taking place at the stations of the Pacifica network, an independently funded, socially progressive radio system with stations in Los Angeles, Berkeley and New York. Founded by pacifists who had gone to prison during World War Two rather than serve in the U.S. armed forces, Pacifica first went on the air in 1949 over KPFA in Berkeley, California, which received the first non-commercial license in the United States not go to an educational or religious institution. Joined by KPFK in Los Angeles in 1959 and New York station WBAI in 1960 the Pacifica network became the model for a new kind of socially conscious broadcasting in the United States. Committed to social justice and relying upon volunteers for most of its staff and producers, Pacifica provided a forum for people and views that would otherwise have been without a broadcast outlet. [34]

Modeling itself initially on the BBC, the Pacifica stations at first devoted only a small part of their programming to politics and social issues. Nonetheless, KPFA during the first decade of the Cold War was broadcasting some of the most provocative programming in the United States. Pacifica was an unique place. Staffed by liberals and radicals who wanted to present their listeners in-depth coverage of social problems and the dawning American civil rights movement, its programming was not governed by the time constrictions of commercial radio. The ideal formats in which to tell these stories were extended interviews and the long-form documentary, a type of programming rapidly disappearing from commercial radio. The key figure in the development of the Pacifica documentary sound would be Public Affairs Director Elsa Knight Thompson who had worked for the BBC while helping evacuate children from London during the Second World War. Knight had returned to the states after the war and finding herself unfit for employment at the networks because of her leftist politics landed at Pacifica where she introduced the politically-oriented long-form documentary. Following the BBC model, Thompson gave her producers a great deal of freedom in creating their programs, and the air time necessary to present their stories in depth, thereby carrying on the BBC tradition of treating listeners seriously and demanding a great deal from them. Under McKnight's direction Pacifica developed a cadre of committed documentary producers, who eschewed the voice-of-doom narrative style for a more personal and reportorial form of address. Laboring in relative obscurity during the 1950s, Pacifica would come into its own in the 1960s when its stations provided early and sympathetic coverage of the liberation movements either ignored or misunderstood by the mainstream media. It was Pacifica that brought many white listeners their first extended exposure to the voices of the Civil Rights movement, broadcasting and distributing interviews with Rosa Parks (1956), James Farmer (1961), and Fannie Lou Hamer (1965); and speeches by Martin Luther King (1957), Malcolm X (1964, 1965)and Eldridge Cleaver (1968). [35]

Pacifica reporters produced a series of extraordinary long-form documentaries on the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, on Birmingham in May 1963, Mississippi during the summer of 1964, and from the streets at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August, 1968. The Pacifica reporters recorded these events as they unfolded, then used extended actualities to transport the listener in place and time, the narrator cutting back and forth between his on-the-spot narration of what was taking place and the scripted continuity. Dale Minor's Freedom Now , (1963) an riveting report from Birmingham, Alabama, recorded in the summer of 1963, is wonderful example of the Pacifica long-form documentary. Covering the five-day period from Monday, May 13, when the Civil Rights leaders and local merchants first reach an accord, through Saturday, May 18,1963, the day after the bombing of the Gaston Motel, Minor built his program on extended cuts with major participants on both sides of the struggle. We hear CORE organizer Mary Hamilton speaking about her incarceration just after her release from jail, Martin Luther King exhorting his followers to keep the peace, Birmingham Mayor Haynes railing against Communists and outside agitators, King and Abernathy speaking in the Birmingham pool halls the morning after the bombing calling for calm. Minor is on the scene, the documentarian as participant observer, providing explanation and description. We hear the sounds of gunfire, and the events as they unfold. Pacifica's coverage of Birmingham was unique, devoting the time necessary to just listen, to just be present and hear what was taking place, and to stay with the story long enough for the events not just to come to life, but to sink in and leave an impression.
Pacifica's long-form documentaries offered unique opportunities for reflection, allowing listeners to think and ruminate about what was taking place, and about their own responses to the events. They provided unique listening experiences, ideally suited for engaging listeners to ruminate about matters to which they had given insufficient thought, providing the time needed to think through their own prejudices and responses. In producing these pieces the Pacifica documentarians practiced a form of radio documentary that was unique in American broadcasting history.[36]

The Civil Rights movement and social activism of the 1960s made Pacifica an important source of information for growing numbers of disaffected Americans. Pacifica stations became seedbeds of innovative programming. Staffed largely by volunteers, the quality of programming could be radically inconsistent, but the stations won devoted followings of listeners who were drawn by a style of radio they had never before heard. Pacifica stations broadcast long-form interviews with drug addicts, political radicals, social activists, and others on the margins of American social and political spectrum, some of which, such as Byron Bryant's 1958 interview with social activist Ammon Hennacy, editor of Catholic Worker and author of Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist, delved extensively into oral history. [37]

The Pacifica stations allowed their volunteers a great deal of latitude to experiment with their documentaries. "Someone may sit up all night for weeks miking the sounds of people and things and come out with a sound montage that adds a new dimension to our experience of ourselves and each other," recalled documentary Pacifica producer Chris Koch of WBAI in 1965. "Someone may go out and raise the money to go to Mississippi, or Mexico, or to California's central valley and live with the people there for a while, recording their conversations and their music, and then come back and make beautiful programs out of it." (Koch would go on to become director of All Things Considered in the early 1980s.) Despite their importance at the time, few aural documentaries from the 1950s or 1960s hold up particularly well. Well into the 1970s most producers still worked in isolation, reinventing the form as they went along. Shoe-string budgets, lack of training or knowledge of the field, inferior equipment begged or borrowed that was both bulky and sensitive: all conspired to make programs such as Terkel's Born to Die or Dale Minor's Freedom Summer quite rare. Most producers drawn into non-commercial radio before the arrival of National Public Radio (NPR) took their inspiration not from radio documentaries productions, but from Larry Josephson at WBAI in New York, Studs Terkel in Chicago, nationally syndicated Gene Shepard, and other radio personalities who were reinventing the sound of American radio by breaking down the walls between listener and broadcaster and who were introducing a new form of more spontaneous, experimental, unpredictable, and therefor exciting programming. [38]

National Public Radio and the Renaissance of the Sound Documentary

The next major step forward in the aural documentary can be traced to the appearance of the audio cassette recorder in the late 1960s and establishment of National Public Radio in 1970. Recognizing the need for commercial-free television, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Only as an afterthought--and in response to heavy lobbying by Jerry Sandler, hen head of National Education Radio-- did it add on a provision for the creation of a national educational radio network. Incorporated in March, 1970, with a mandate to provide national programming, National Public Radio went on the air in April, 1971, with live broadcasts of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings to end the Vietnam War. All Things Considered (ATC) debuted two weeks later, airing live coverage of anti-war demonstrations in Washington D.C. (Another innovation of the NPR system was the interconnection of member stations through phone lines. Before then, educational radio had been a tape network.) [39]

Under the direction of William Siemering, former station manager of WBFO in Buffalo, New York, NPR embraced both the social idealism of the 1960s and the premise pioneered in non-commercial radio during the previous decade that the sound should help tell the story. Raised in Wisconsin, Siemering had grown up listening to the CBC and American educational radio. Siemering had worked as a high-school English and history teacher before being draw to radio. Working at WBFO in Buffalo during the mid-1960s, he became interested in oral history while producing The Nation Within a Nation, a radio series on Iroquois in upstate New York. Siemering soon became more and more enamored of the ability of sound to tell a story, especially after BFO coverage of student anti-war activism. Convinced that radio could be exciting, live, and spontaneous, he began production of This is Radio, a public affairs program that included recordings from Buffalo city council meetings. [40]

Based on the programming innovations at WBFO, Siemering outlined the concept for an ambitious new approach to public affairs radio at a station managers' meeting in 1969. A year later he was hired to bring the concept to life in the NPR's new flagship program, All Things Considered . Congress created NPR with a mandate to reflect American regionalism and provide for as much participation of member stations in production as possible. Siemering's first mission statement for ATC was imbued with the social idealism of the era. The program was to get its inspiration from grassroots America, and to "promote personal growth rather than corporate gain." It was to give the theater, arts, and music equal emphasis with the news, emphasize live coverage, and "not only call attention to a problem, but be an active agent in seeking solution." ATC was to be different from that which had gone before. To help give it this new sound, Siemering wanted to replace the impersonal March of Time narrative voice with a natural conversational style of address, wanted to slow the pace of the newscasts, and to allow, as much as possible, the sound to tell the story, which would receive enough time to be told in depth. Integrating innovations pioneered in educational radio stations of the Midwest and the Pacifica stations, All Things Considered became the first nationally syndicated program committed to telling stories and presenting news through the use of sound. In the process, NPR began to attract or hire away from its own and the Pacifica stations many of the best young producers in the country, bringing an actuality-based approach to radio broadcast journalism to a growing national audience, and initiating a renaissance for the audio documentary. [41]

The NPR revolution was also built upon a new recording technology. The use of sound to tell a story had been made easier in the late 1960s with the introduction of inexpensive, lightweight, portable, broadcast-quality cassette field recorders, which could record anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour on each side of a small, self-enclosed, and inexpensive "cassette." The cassette recorder gave producers and news gatherers unprecedented flexibility in recording in the field. Once back in the studio, they could dub their actualities and ambiances onto reel-to-reel tapes, which could then be mixed together with narration and music from different sources onto a mastering deck. Once a producer had mastered the basic production techniques of segue, cross-fade, and layering, skillfully mixed segments could then be edited together into seamless sound pieces.

Working on a shoe-string budget, NPR quickly attracted a dedicated staff of young reporters, producers and engineers who believed in the new network's mission. Relying heavily on pieces supplied by member stations and independent producers, NPR's programming may have suffered from uneven quality, but was varied and exciting, and at times riveting. Unrestricted by the old radio documentary and news report formulas, young producers such as Joe Frank, Josh Darsa, and Robert Montiegal extended the ATC emphasis on sound. One of the first producers to abandon altogether any third-person narration was independent producer Keith Talbot, who in 1972 began producing a series of pieces he called "Sound Portraits," the only outside features ATC awarded a regular time period. Talbot had been drawn to radio through listening to WBAI during the late 1960s. Determined to put "ordinary" people on radio and to push the emphasis on sound already present at NPR, Talbot recorded people talking about their lives right where they lived and worked, then produced a series of short, five-minute audio montages that let them speak for themselves. Talbot approached his pieces as a storyteller, attempting to give individual lives a dramatic form by fashioning audio portraits from monologues. Mara O'Carty, an early piece on a woman contemplating suicide first aired in December 1972, demonstrates his approach. [42](CD: Selection 2)

The piece is built around O'Carty's reflections on her own upbringing and the upbringing of her children, which leads to her contemplation of suicide. Talbot's spare use of sound mirrors O'Carty's geographically isolated life in upstate New York and her psychological isolation. Each sound in the piece, from the ticking clock heard briefly at the beginning and end to O'Carty's own sighs and sniffles, complement and contextualize her story, bringing her words to life and providing the listener invaluable and essential audio clues about her state of mind. Matching the austere, isolated mental state of the monologist, the sounds also draw the listener into her world. In an earlier sound portrait recorded in September, 1972, Talbot had made a similar use of sound to help tell the story of black street vendor Mark Johnson. Johnson's love of the bustle and activity of ballpark crowds and of rush-hour traffic and pedestrians is reflected in the traffic noise and humming of voices that fill the piece.

Talbot's sound portraits are representative of the many experiments undertaken by documentary producers in the 1970s searching to discover the unique qualities and strengths of radio. And it was the sound documentaries and sound pieces that gave NPR much of its excitement and that provided those rare moments that kept listeners tuning in. Pieces like Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown, a ninety-minute documentary on the last days of the Jonestown commune in Guyana that included riveting tape of recorded during the last few moths before the mass suicide. Each of these pieces were special in how they opened people's ears. Their producers discovered or chanced upon ways to tell stories in ways that could not be told in any other medium. It may well be the difference between description and exhibition. Here were the seeds of a truly audio aesthetic. Unfortunately, from the point of the view of the aural historian, there were never enough people thinking in sound to make an impact on the NPR news services, which remained dominated by journalists coming from print backgrounds.

Anchored by NPR, public radio underwent extraordinary growth in the 1970s. Most of the nation's 296 educational radio stations in 1967 had operated on annual budgets of less than $25,000. By 1978 nearly 200 stations boasting annual average budgets of $225,000 had qualified for CPB certification and now reached 4.3 million people each week. Expanding listener pledges and moneys flowing into the system from the national and state arts and humanities endowments, private foundations, and corporations had increased funding to $450m a year. NPR's original mission statement had included a mandate to open the airwaves to groups under-represented in the commercial media; especially minorities, women, and people residing in regions outside of the major metropolitan areas. Part of this mission had been accomplished through the acquisition of programs and reports from producers based at stations throughout the growing NPR network. By 1976 PBS and NPR were distributing nearly 2,000 hours of programming, a significant portion coming from both independent and station-based producers. This diversity helped give NPR its wonderful and unique sound; hard news mixed with feature pieces that democratized the airwaves and gave voices to a broad cross section of Americans who would otherwise have remained unheard. In this one can recognize NPR as an expression of the same social forces that were fueling the new social history, the new community history, and expanding mission of oral history as a tool for documenting the worlds of those previously excluded from the historical record.

As the flagship of the public radio system, the NPR set the standard for most documentary producers working in the field. The NPR-style documentary provided a quality model that built on the old continuity/actuality/sound bridge formula. ATC and NPR's special programs series also became the forum for producers who were breaking away from the traditional formula and experimenting with new forms. Independent producers carried the sound portrait forward, some of them making sophisticated and sensitive use of oral histories and archival recordings. One of the most successful of the new generation of sound pieces utilizing oral histories was the Kitchen Sister's (Davia Nelson and Nicki Silva) World War 2 on the Homefront, broadcast in May, 1982. (CD: Selection 3)

An audio remembrance on life at home during the war, World War 2 on the Homefront makes superb use of oral histories combined with popular music, new reports, and movie clips of the time. Opening with a sound clip from a Hollywood romance used to mobilize popular support for the war, the piece goes on to demonstrate how many relationships were permanently changed by the separation of the war, and how others, and indeed, how whole lives were put on hold. Separation, loneliness, and stoicism are the themes Silva and Nelson use to characterize war life on the homefront. If there is a central motif it is that of waiting. What really brings it all to life is their incorporation of record letters from the 1940s; recordings made by wives and girlfriends to their loved ones overseas, and by GIs to loved ones back home. Deeply personal and private documents, these records were never meant for public broadcast. Moving back and forth between past and present, between private, first-person experiences and the romanticized vision of the war presented in motion pictures and the popular music of the day, the Kitchen Sisters were able to fashion a powerful commentary on the dynamics of public propaganda and private existence. Produced without narration, the piece is absolutely gripping. Focusing on the thoughts and emotions of the participants, this is truly a story better told in sound than any other medium.