Tell Me A StoryCorps

In 2003 the radio producer David Isay had an idea – to ask Americans one simple question: ‘Tell me about your life’, and let everyone hear the answer.

But he knew people tell it best to a single interested party. So when he set up StoryCorps, with its Storybooths across the States, he arranged things so that everyone who visits the booths has to be accompanied by someone else. It’s not recording for posterity; it’s a conversation with a friend or relative, which allows for an intimacy and spontaneity that’s unusual in oral history recording. Dubbed 'The conversation of a lifetime', the stories are available on-line and are used in documentaries on NPR. They are all archived in the Library of Congress, and Isay has quoted from many in his book about the project.

At Liverpool John Moores' University media students were inspired by the StoryCorps approach to record pairs of people telling each other: The Thing I've Never Told Anyone. They found themselves drawn in, given the opportunity to ask family and friends questions they'd never previously had time to. Isay emphasises this aspect of StoryCorps: how it creates a space for interaction in our time-poor lives.

The method seems to get results. But some oral historians have questioned whether these contributions have lasting value.