Tell Me a Storycorps

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Archive on 4: Tell Me a Storycorps

Tell Me A StoryCorps

BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, Tell Me a Storycorps

StoryCorps asks Americans to "Tell me about your life". Simon Garfield listens in.

In 2003 David Isay asked Americans: "tell me about your life". Simon Garfield explores the tales inside StoryCorps. From 2009.

In 2003, 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 they have lasting value. At the British Library, Oral History Curator Rob Perks says he often finds them sentimental and believes they lack the objective rigour of the traditional oral history interview. 

Simon Garfield, who has drawn on the Mass Observation Diaries for his own books, compares StoryCorps with traditional oral history and asks whether, now we all possess the means to record our lives,  those recordings are still of value and worth keeping.

Producer: Marya Burgess 

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2009.

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