The poetic musings of ordinary people
What the Gutenberg printing press did for the written word, Dave Isay has helped accomplish for the spoken word. That is to say, he has perfected a way to capture it, preserve it and serve it forward.
Isay, an award-winning radio producer and documentary maker, could just as well be called America’s storyteller-in-chief. As the originator of StoryCorps, he has helped create a repository of voice recordings housed at the Library of Congress.
Through StoryCorps recording booths and smartphone apps thousands of ordinary Americans have rallied to tell their stories. Together, their recordings paint a street-level portrait of America in the first decades of the 21st century.
“In 100 years, it will tell the story of who we are,” says Isay, who will speak to students and the general public at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 6 at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. “Essentially, this is about collecting wisdom.”
More than a quarter of a million people have made audio recordings for StoryCorps, often while being interviewed by people they know. Some of those recordings are broadcast Friday mornings on NPR’s “All Things Considered” program.
The StoryCorps library is said to be the largest single collection of voices in human history, and aims to “pass wisdom from one generation to the next, and to leave a legacy for the future.” This crowdsourced, bottom-up version of history ultimately may change the way future societies view the past.
Isay says many of the people who have contributed recordings to StoryCorps have done so with the full knowledge that they might be speaking to their great-grandchildren.
At Berry College, Isay will talk about his book, “Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work,” based on a collection of interviews of people talking about their jobs. About 90 percent of the students at Berry work on campus, so a lecture about the nobility of work is a good fit.
“People find meaning in their work,” Isay says. “It has a huge impact on their sense of happiness.
“… There are no billionaires, no tech CEOs [interviewed in the book],” he says. “… Just the beauty and poetry of [ordinary] people talking about work.”
Isay said he got the idea for “Callings” after talking to his wife’s “brilliant, devoted” OB-GYN, who confided to him:
“I just wish I had done something in my life that was important.” Isay was so taken by the irony of her statement — given her important work — that he imagined the book.
Meanwhile, StoryCorps, which has been around since 2003, is evolving to cast an even wider net.
Since 2015, American students have used a smartphone app to participate in “The Great Thanksgiving Listen,” an oral history project that encourages young people to interview older family members during the long holiday weekend.
Those recordings, in turn, will become foundational family history archives.
Next month, the StoryCorps team will launch a new project called One Small Step that seeks to find middle ground in our polarized political environment by pairing people of different beliefs to sit down together to make recordings.
The lecture at Berry College is free and open to the public.