The Life Story

Author(s): Jeff Todd Titon

Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 93, No. 369 (Jul. - Sep., 1980), pp. 276-292
Published by: American Folklore Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/540572 .
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JEFF

TODD

TITON

The Life Story*

A LIFESTORY IS, simply, a person's story of his or her life, or of what he or she

thinks is a significant part of that life. It is therefore a personal narrative,a

story of personal experience, and, as it emerges from conversation, its ontological status is the spoken word, even if the story is transcribedand edited
for the printed page. The storyteller trusts the listener(s) and the listener
respectsthe storyteller,not interruptingthe train of thought until the story is
finished. That is not to say the listeneris passiveas a doorknob;he nods assent,
interposes a comment, frames a relevant question; indeed, his presence and
reactionsare essentialto the story. He may coincidentallybe a folklorist, but
his role is mainly that of a sympatheticfriend.
This essay is directedto folkloristswhose fieldwork, like my own, involves
talking to people and finding out about their lives. My intention is to define
and develop an approachto the life story as a self-containedfiction, and thus to
distinguish it sharplyfrom its historicalkin: biography, oral history, and the
personalhistory (or "life history," as it is called in anthropology).
Among the dimensionsof folk culturewhich RichardDorson observedduring his 1968 field trip to Gary, Indiana,and East Chicago, was something he
called "personalhistory." In the 1970 articlewhich resulted, "Is There a Folk
in the City?" he told folklorists to cast aside worries over whether the personal history is a traditional oral genre, and urged them to collect the
"thousands of sagascreatedfrom life experiencesthat deserve, indeed cry for,
recording."' Dorson caught the documentaryspirit of the times. The following decade witnessed a rebirth of interest in the experiences of ordinary
Americans, especially blue-collar workers, racial and ethnic minorities, and
*

A slightly different version of this essay formed the basis of an illustratedlecture before the Graduate
Colloquium in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvaniaon October 1, 1979. I am grateful
for their invitation and for their suggestions in the discussion which followed.
i Richard M. Dorson, "Is There a Folk in the City?" rpt. in Folklore:SelectedEssays(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. 67-68.

THE LIFESTORY

277

women. Not since the New Deal era was there such a burst of documentary
energy. Studs Terkel's books became best-sellers;Robert Coles's books influenced public policy; Theodore Rosengarten's life of black Alabama
sharecropper Ned Cobb won the National Book Award; professional
sociologists turned out monographson the lives and opinions of the so-called
silent majority;hundredsof oral history projectswere born at the local level,
thousandsof people were interviewed, and millions of pages of typescriptwere
produced.2 Folklore's contribution to the documentation decade, in the
popular mind, resides in the Foxfire concept of education, and the resulting
Foxfirebooks, now including five volumes.3
In the midst of all the documentation it is well to recall what Thoreau
wrote: "Much is published, but little is printed."4 Most of the published
documents appearto be life storiesbut are not. That is, they give the impression that someone is speaking about his life in his own voice, but in reality
someone else has muffled and distortedit. What appearsto be a person telling
a life story is usually an informant answering a seriesof questions. Then by a
common ruse the interview comes to masqueradeas a life story. The interviewer or an editor selects the relevant answers; arrangesthem according to
editorialpurposes,be they chronological,topicalor historical;smooths out the
talk for the printedpage; and then removesthe questions. This falsealchemyis
clear enough when one compares Terkel's writings with his tapes; it is a
brazen art in the hands of Coles (who does not use a tape recorder);5it is obvious in the two or three segments of each Foxfirebook given over to personal
narratives;and it is evident, also, in the relatively small number of personal
documents which professionalfolklorists have published.
The reason we transforminterviews into life stories on the printed page
without much uneasinessis that we habituallyfail to distinguish story from
history when the medium is talk. Dorson's choice of the phrase "personal
history" is illuminating, for he used it interchangeablywith the phrase "life
story" when recalling how he happenedupon examples of them: "Several
2

Studs Terkel's Division StreetAmerica (New York: Random House, 1967) was the first of four
volumes; Robert Coles's Childrenof Crisis(Boston: Little Brown, 1967) was the first of five; Theodore
Rosengarten, All God'sDangers(New York: Knopf, 1974).
3

The first five volumes, published by Doubleday & Co., appearedbetween 1972 and 1979.

Walden,chapter 4: "Sounds."
5 Interviewed Dick Cavett on a television
by
program I saw in Boston early in 1978, Coles said the tape
recorder made the people he spoke with nervous. He said he learned to catch language by watching
William Carlos Williams emerge from house calls and jot down his patients' phrases.

278

JEFFTODD TITON

memorablelife stories,"he wrote, "cameto my earswithoutprompting."6

As a good historian,Dorsonknowsthatstoryis not the sameas history.If he
sometimesconflatesthe two, it may be becausehis conceptof folk history
of oraltraditionsandpersonaldocuments,set in
relieson the transformation
the structuresof everydaylife, into the historyof the folk.7
is perhapsbest understoodthrough
The differencebetweenstoryandhistory
what CharlesOlson, that most historicalof poets, labeled"stance." Olson
stancestowardlife: fiction (story, including
identifiedtwo complementary
poetry); and history. In its root sense,facio, fiction is not a lie but a
"making"; whereashistory, istorin,is "found out." To Herodotus,the
Greekverbpoiein(fromwhich ourpoetderives)meant"to make," whereas
meant"to findout
the nounhistormeanta "learnedman"andthe verbistorin
for oneself."8A storyis made,but historyis foundout. Storyis languageat
play; historyis languageat work. The languageof story is chargedwith
power: it creates.The languageof historyis chargedwith knowledge:it
discovers.Storyis a literatureof the imagination;history,thoughit be imaginative,drivestoward fact. The generationof historianswho were my
teachersbelieved,alongwith R. G. Collingwood,thathistorywasa branchof
the humanities.So long as historyis humanistic,it is a complementof story;
but they arenot the sameandcertainlynot interchangeable.9
"The reallanguageof menin a stateof vividsensation"was how Wordsthe sourceof his own poeticdiction,contrastingit with
worth characterized
the languageof artificeusedby poetswho hadbeenlong out of touchwith
genuine human sympathy.10The romanticbaggage which accompanied
Wordsworth'srevolutionaryideasplaceda value on rusticlife which few
modernfolkloristswould publiclyembrace;nonetheless,his interestin the
commonman and womanof the countrysidewas chieflyan interestin the
renewingpowerof a naturallanguagethatarosefromdeeplyfelt, personalexperience.This, of course,is the languageof the life story,not the languageof

Dorson, "Is There a Folk," p. 67.

See Richard M. Dorson, "History of the Elite and History of the Folk," in Folklore:SelectedEssays,
pp. 225-259.
8
Charles Olson, The SpecialView of History,ed. Ann Charters (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970), especiallypp.
19-23.
7

Collingwood's views may be read in his The Idea of History(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948).
10Preface to
LyricalBallads(1805). The quoted phrase appearsin its second sentence.

THE LIFESTORY

279

history. It is particularlynot the language of history today, for increasingly

during the past twenty years the narrativemode of writing history hasbeen attackedfor its failureto meet adequatestandardsof scientificexplanation.Many
historians now believe that so-called covering-law explanations-that is, explanationsof specificevents by a generallaw which "covers" the specificconditions-are the only valid form of historicalexplanation. Whatever its value
in historical writing, this scientific criterion is irrelevant to explanation in
storytelling. Why it is irrelevantis best illustratedby an example, a life story.
The following life story is the religious conversion narrativeof blues singer
Son House, which he told to me in responseto my askingwhy he waited until
adulthood to become a blues singer. I have transcribedit verbatimfrom my
field tape:

When I was a kid, a youngster, a teen-a young teenagerand up like that I was more churchified. Then that's mostly all I could see into. Cause they'd had us go, we'd had to go to the
Sabbathschool every Sunday. We didn't miss goin to no Sabbathschool. We'd be into that
and then in this church there, some of the ones a little largerthan me and like that, and it come
time of year for em to run revivalmeetin. Some pastorcome to open up the revivalmeetin, oh,
for a week or more. [Coughs.] Well, we'd all be goin to the thing they call the mourners'
bench. Gettin on your knees, you know, and lettin the old folks pray for you. Yeah, and in a
couple of days or weeks, somebody'd come up, holler out they had something. They had
religion. They'd squall round man, go on. So they left me thataway I guess, oh
about, nearbout six or eight months sometime. I didn't fall for it becauseI, I figured they was
puttin on and I didn't want to be puttin on. I wanted mine to be real and so Ijust kept on until finally, [clears throat] the next session, I said, "Is there-this one time I'm just gon see
is-is any way to get this thing religion they goin round here talkin about, puttin on and goin
on." I prayed and prayed, commenced prayin, man, every night, workin in the field, and
plowin the mule and everything. Work all day hard, and go on home, whew, tryin to pray,
tryin to pray, and work. So, finally, I kept on like that until they come back home that night,
middle of the night after the pastor turned out. So I went on home. And I was livin down in
the lower part [of] the place from where my daddy an them stayed, down to my cousin's.
Went down there; I didn't want to be up there around the old folks. And man, I went out
back of the house a little bit, in this old alfalfafield out there. I had been scaredof snakes,
'cause snakeswould be bad in the summertime, you know, crawlin through them weeds and
things. But I wasn't studyin them snakes then. I'd say they better get out of the way if they
don't want to get their heads mashed off! [Laughs.] I went on. I was there in that alfalfafield
and I got down. Pray. Gettin on my knees in that alfalfa.Dew was fallin. And man, I prayed
and I prayed and I prayed and for wait awhile, man I hollered out. Found out then. I said,
"Yes, it is somethin to be got too, 'cause I got it now!" [Laughs.] Sure did. Went on back
there to that house and told my cousin Robert and all them bout that and went, walked about
two miles and a little better, and up to another white fellow's house, and woke him up and
told him all about it. We was workin for him, too. But I wouldn't carehow tough he was or
what not. "Get up out of that bed and listen to what I got to say." [Laughs.] He thought I

JEFFTODD TITON

280

was crazy! Yeah. Name was, we all called him Mister Keaton, T. F. Keaton. Yeah, I say,
"Oh yeah!" Found out better now.1

On hearingthis story, a doubtingThomasmight objectthat it containsa

hollow core;that the beforeandafterof conversionis described,but not the
momentitself.Someonewho hadundergonea similarexperienceandwas less
of an empiricistwouldperhapssaysucha demandwas philistine.But proofis
not at issuehere.Nor is it a questionof whetherthe religionSon Housewas
convertedto is a delusion.What is at issueis a humanbeingrecollecting,in a
state of vivid sensation,a criticalmomentin his life, and to a degreereexperiencingit by meansof storytelling.Coveringlaws statingconditionsunder
which conversionis probableoperatein an entirelydifferentdimension.A
sophisticatedreligiouscritiquemight scoreSon House for confusingan intenselyfelt experiencewith the validationof a worldview, but no criticcould
rob him of the memoryof his religiousconversion.His life story is not a
historicaldescription,and it does not obey historicallaws. It is a fiction, a
making,and, like all powerfulfictions,it drivestowardenactment.
OralHistory,andthePersonal
History
Biography,
Among the historicalkin to the life storyarebiography,oralhistory,and
life history).Any folkloristinterested
the personalhistory(or anthropological
of these
in the life storywoulddo well to becomefamiliarwith the procedures
historicalgenres,if only to avoidthem. Folkloristspracticingthesehistorical
genres,which of courseareperfectlylegitimatefolkloristicinterests,should,
on the other hand, understandwhy they cannotpretend,to themselvesor
others,that theirproductsarelife stories.
cameinto Englishwith Dryden,who in 1683definedit
The word biography
men'slives."12The biographical
as "the historyof particular
impulseis praise
for an exemplarylife, andso the publicfunctionof mostbiographyis didactic,
either implicitly or explicitly."3Modern standardsof professionalismin
1 Recorded in Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 8, 1971. A plastic soundsheet recording and my
ethnopoetic transcription are available in Jeff Titon, "Son House: Two Narratives," Alcheringa:
Ethnopoetics,NS, 2, No. 1 (1976), 2-6. A conventional transcriptionappearsin Jeff Todd Titon, Early
DownhomeBlues:A Musicaland CulturalAnalysis(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 21-22.
The slight discrepanciesin the texts reflect changes in my understanding of House's diction over the
years.
12

Bobbs-Merrill,
3rd ed. (Indianapolis:
to Literature,
Quotedin C. Hugh Holman,ed., A Handbook

1972), p. 64.
13 See Robert
Gittings, The Nature of Biography(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), pp.
19-21. I suppose another impulse must be curiosity about an allegedly scandalouslife.

THE LIFESTORY

281

biographical
writing, however,dictatethat the biographerowe his allegiance
not to his subjectbut the factsof his subject'slife. In Theory
Rene
ofLiterature,
Wellek explainswhy the biographeradoptshistoricalmethods:
The problems of a biographer are simply those of a historian. He has to interpret his
documents, letters, accountsby eye-witnesses, reminiscences,autobiographicalstatements, and
to decide questions of genuineness, trustworthiness of witnesses, and the like. In the actual
writing of biography he encounters the problems of chronological presentation, of selection,
of discretion or frankness.The ratherextensive work which has been done on biography as a
genre deals with such questions, questions in no way specificallyliterary.14

The biographer
is thusa historian,a life writeraimingto describeandexplain
the circumstances
of his subject'slife, personality,andinfluence.Yet because
his productis the record,sometimeseventhe story,of a life, the historicalimof dataavailableto the
aginationwill sometimescrawlout fromthe avalanche
modernbiographerandturnits subjectinto a palpablehumanbeing, usually
by giving him or her words to say. Boswell, the first modernbiographer,
catchesJohnson'spersonthroughhis conversationmore than anythingelse.
When we hearhim, then we know him, or at leastwe think we do.
A biographywhich announcesitself as the writer's accountof someone
else's life is not likely to be confusedwith the life storybecausethereis no
questionaboutwho is the author.The questionof authorshipis centralto the
problemsof oral historyand the personalhistory,but the lines are clearly
drawn in biography.Biographyper se has not had much of an appealto
in recentyears,when the mainlines of researchand
folklorists,particularly
have
concentrated
in collection,annotation,andanalysisof texts; in
writing
folkloristictheory;in materialculture;andin the application
of folkloreto the
concernsof local, tradition-bearing
groups.s1
Oralhistory,likebiography,proceedsfroma historicalratherthana fictive
stance.Likebiography,its overridingconcernis with factualaccuracy.Unlike
biography,its focus is chieflyon events,processes,causesandeffectsrather
thanon the individualswhose recollectionsfurnishoralhistorywith its raw
data.A recentdevelopment,oralhistorydatesfromjust afterWorldWar II,
when Allan Nevins of ColumbiaUniversityconvincedhis institutionto
becomea repositoryforinterviewswith the men-and in mostcasestheywere
men-who had"madehistory."Historiansweretrainedto asklawyers'questionsin aneffortto get evidencefromlivingwitnesses.By 1974morethan300
14Rene Wellek and AustinWarren,
3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt,Braceand
Theoryof Literature,
World, 1956), pp. 75-76.
15But see the

Scott:TheWoodsmanbiographical
analyticalstudiesby EdwardD. Ives,particularlyJoe
(Urbana:Universityof IllinoisPress,1978).
Songmaker

282

JEFFTODD TITON

institutions in the United States housed more than 500 different oral history
projects.16
Not all the projects in oral history are elitist. Possibly in response to the
climate of the "new" social history, oral history projects now sometimes
focus on the experiencesof ordinaryAmericans.When RichardDorson called
for a folk history built up from the personal histories whose collection he
urged, he could not have anticipatedthe local oral history projects that were
springing up even as he was writing. Yet his assessment that professional
historianswould not be the ones to undertakefolk history projectsis still correct.'7 The new socialhistory's emphasisupon quantificationand its distrustof
literary evidence drive historiansinto harderand harder "scientific" lines in
order to maintain professionalrespectability.18Charts, graphs, tables, Greek
symbols, and a variety of English sentences reduced to laws expressed by
mathematicalequationsnow stareout from the pages of the historicaljournals,
while personaldocuments are left far behind in the quantitativeanalysis.
Scientism of this sort has not yet appearedamong folk-culturallyoriented
oral histories, but they suffer from other problems. The AppalachianOral
History Project, for example, based at Alice Lloyd College in eastern Kentucky, began interviewing residentsof central Appalachiain 1971. In 1977 it
An OralHistoryand introducedthe book as a "social
publishedOurAppalachia:
history"which "has providedthe opportunity to let residentsof the region tell
their own story"(my italics).19Here is anotherillustrationof the confusion of
history with story. This oral history is reallythe productof highly directedinterviews, and we know this because the editors had the good sense to print
some of the questions. When we come across a leading question in Our Appalachia,such as "What was it about John Wright that made his word law
among the children?" (p. 60), we know we are not listening to a story. Instead, we are reading the result of a collaborative venture between the
historiansand the informants.This collaborationis the natureof oral history,
as Edward D. Ives recognizes in his introduction to Argyle Boom, an oral
history of log transportationon the Penobscot River:
For textbooks in collecting and editing oral history, see, for example, OralHistory:FromTapeto Type
andEditingOralHistory
(Chicago: American LibraryAssociation, 1977), and Willa K. Baum, Transcribing
(Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1977).
16

17

Dorson, "History of the Elite," pp. 239-241.

18 For a review, see Lawrence

Veysey, "The 'New' Social History in the Context of American
Historical Writing," Reviews in AmericanHistory,7 (1979), 1-12.
19 Our
Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 3.
Appalachia,ed. LaurelShackelfordand Bill Weinberg (New York:

THE LIFESTORY

283

The descriptionsmen like Ernest Kennedy and Alphonse Martin gave came in responseto the
questions the students put to them, and new questions grew out of their responses. Oral
history interviews are the joint creations of two people, interviewer and interviewee. .. .20

In oral history the balanceof power between the informantsand historianis in

the historian'sfavor, for he asks the questions, sorts through the accountsfor
the relevantinformation, and edits his way toward a coherent whole-as, for
example, Ives quite properly did in Argyle Boom. But in the life story the
balancetips the other way, to the storyteller,while the listener is sympathetic
and his responses are encouraging and nondirective. If the conversation is
printed, it should ideallybe printedverbatim,or if presentedon film it should
ideally be unedited.
Folk-culturaloral histories often sharea curious editing techniquewhich is
worth comment here. It may be observedin the aforementionedoral histories
and the Foxfirebooks. The editors do not hesitateto splicetogether sectionsof
one or more interviews outside the chronologicalorderof the telling. They do
not hesitate to delete sections of interviews nor words from the informants'
sentences.Yet they seem to believe that by bracketingwords which they supply for continuity, thereby distinguishing them from words which the informants actually spoke, they are remaining faithful to their informants'
language. This bracketing procedureseems to me to pretend to a degree of
scrupulousnessthat is unjustified,given the editoriallibertiestaken in excision
and rearrangement.The false claims that result-and I am aware of the problem becauseI have been one of the claimers21-cansometimeseven go so far as
to convince the editor that what resultsis what the informanthad in mind and
would have said if he had been more articulate.
Of the historicalkin to the life story, the personalhistory is the most problematic, for it is a written account of a person'slife basedon spoken conversations and interviews. The anthropologicalliteratureis filled with hundredsof
these personal histories, called life histories, while folklorists and
ethnomusicologistshave producedperhapstwo dozen. In his 1965 treatiseon
the anthropologicallife history, L. L. Langnessviews the enterpriseas essentially biographical rather than autobiographical, and in this he is surely
correct.22In his review of the literaturehe acknowledgesthat anthropologists
20
21

Argyle Boom, ed. Edward D. Ives, NortheastFolklore,17 (1976), 18.

See FromBluesto Pop: The Autobiography
of Leonard"BabyDoo" Caston,ed. Jeff Titon (Los Angeles:

John EdwardsMemorialFoundationSpecialSeries,No. 4, 1974), p. 1.

22
L. L. Langness, The Life Historyin Anthropological
Science(New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1965), pp. 1-7.

284

JEFFTODD TITON

collect life historiesprimarilyto obtaininformationabout culture,not individuals.23

Given its orientationtowardculture,it is no wonderthat the
typicallife history strips the individualof his voice. Langnessadvisesthe
would-becollectorthat "Lifehistorymaterialsareseldomthe productof the
informant'sclearlyarticulated,expressive,chronologicalaccountof his life,"
without stoppingto ask whetherthat might be the fault of the collectors'
close questioningand frequentinterruptions,or perhapsthe result of difficultiesin translationfrom the nativelanguage.Langnesscontinues:"This
meansthat a certainamountof editingmust be done . . . particularly
when
commercialpublicationis concerned."24
In otherwordsit is the pressureof
the marketplace
whichforcesthe anthropologist
to takethe rawmaterialfrom
turn
a
and
it
interviews
into
biographywhich pretendsto be an
choppy
is
as
it
But
just likely that thesepressuresreposein his colautobiography.
leagues, his readers,and he himself, all of whom might find verbatim
of the interviewstedious,unrewarding,andat timesembarrassing.
transcripts
My positionwith regardto life historiesis similarto but not so radicalas
LindaDegh's. She writes that "The anthropological
conceptof life history
collectionis unacceptable
to the folklorist,basicallybecauseof the lackof accurateandexactingmethodsof recordingandpublicationwhich reflectsthe
lackof interestin humancreativitymanifestedin the formulationof the narrative."25That creativity cuts both ways, for the life history narrativeis as
much the creation of the anthropologist as of the informant.26But the anthropological concept of life history collection cannot always be "unacceptable" to the folklorist. Sometimesit is impossibleto obtain a life story, either
because of poor rapport, or because the informant is unwilling, taciturn by
nature, or incapableof a sustainednarrative.Yet the life history of an important traditionbearerwhose life story cannot be obtainedwill surelycontribute
folk-cultural information. The anthropologicalliterature contains some life
histories, moreover, which are products of sympatheticconversationsamong
friends; and they usually can be told from the rest because, Langness not-

23

Ibid., pp. 8-12.

24

Ibid., p. 48.

Linda Degh, People in the TobaccoBelt: Four Lives (Ottawa: National Museum of Man, Canadian
Centre for Folk Culture Studies, Paper No. 13, 1975), p. viii.
25

A view similar to my own is expressed in Gelya Frank, "Finding the Common Denominator: A
Phenomenological Critique of Life History Method," Ethos, 7 (1979), 68-94. I am grateful to Barbara
Tedlock for pointing this out and showing me Frank's essay.
26

THE LIFESTORY

285

withstanding,the informantsare articulateand expressivein the context of

friendship.27

Folkloristshavenot publishedas largea proportionof theirinformants'perhave.But sincethe personalhistoryis closer

sonalhistoriesas anthropologists
to the life storythanbiographyor oralhistoryis, folkloricpublications
in personalhistory,howeversmalltheirnumber,meritattentionhere. I shallconcentrateon easilyaccessible,English-language
examples.In this genre,then,
we maynote the earlyinfluenceof the Lomaxes:JohnLomaxwas the guiding
forcebehindthe WPA slavenarrative
collectionandthelifehistoriespublished
in TheseAreOurLivesandSuchas Us,28whileAlanLomaxrecorded
JellyRoll
Morton'slife story for the Libraryof Congressin 1938. The resultinglife
Roll,exhibitsunusuallystrongtensionbetweenstoryand
history,MisterJelly
history.Mortonwas a splendidnarratorandLomaxknewit: "To everyquery
his responseswere so instantandso vivid with time andplaceandwho was
thereandwhat they said,thatI knewJellywas seeingit in fancyif not in actual recollection."29But much of what Morton said was extravagant,and in
writing his book Lomax was torn between his interest in getting the facts
about the birth of jazz and this incredibleand bizarrerelic who was desperate
to tell his boastful story. Lomax finally decidedit was personalhistory that he
was hearing: "That hot May afternoonin the Libraryof Congress a new way
of writing history began-history with music cues, the music evoking
recollection and poignant feeling-history intoned out of the heart of one
man, sparklingwith dialogue and purplewith ego" (p. xiii). MisterJellyRoll is
an extraordinarymix of fact and fiction, life story, personalhistory, and oral
history, served up by a folklorist whose creativeenergies were a sympathetic
match for his informant's.
The majority of folkloric personalhistories have taken musiciansfor their
subjects. My own published attempts in this genre have been no better than
most. I miscalled the personal histories of Lazy Bill Lucas and Baby Doo
Caston autobiographies,put their statements into chronological order, and

27
See, for example, Sidney Mintz, Workerin the Cane (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), and
Son of Old Man Hat: A Navaho Autobiography
Recordedby WalterDyk (1938; rpt. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1967).
28

Norman Yetman, Life Under the "PeculiarInstitution"(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1970), p. 348. TheseAre Our Lives (1937; rpt. New York: Norton, 1975); Suchas Us: SouthernVoicesof
the Thirties,ed. Tom E. Terrill and Jerrold Hirsch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1978).
29Alan Lomax, Mister
Jelly Roll (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1950), pp. 241-242.

286

JEFFTODD TITON

then deleted my questions.30A few years ago when I had second thoughts
about the standardeditorialprocedure,I decided to publish Son House's personal history as a verbatimtranscriptof our conversations.31Robin Morton's
life of John Maguire is similarlya personalhistory in the words of the informant, and the product of a conversationamong friends. Here is what he says
about his nondirectiveinterviewing method, and it is good advice:
First of all I knew John very well before I ever startedthis project. I discussedwith him what I
wanted to do and he agreed to "have a go." So we sat down with an empty tape on the
recorderand began. I first asked a very general question-"Tell me about your early life." I
always asked general questions except when I wanted something explained in more detail.
Once I had asked a question I sat quietly and let John talk. Even when he seemed to have
finished I sat with an expectant look in the hope that he would continue, as he often did. Only
when he seemed to have nothing more to say did I continue with a subsidiaryquery, or go on
to a new areaaltogether. To the extent that I asked questions at all the "story" probablytells
us much about me and my interests as it does about John. It is difficult to see how one
sidesteps such a danger completely.32

One cannot sidestepsuch a dangerso long as there is an audiencefor the story

in the anticipatorymind of a storyteller who conceives of his task as communicatingwith that audience.But that only means that unless the informant
is talking to himself, what seems a "danger" is inherent in any conversation,
and the folklorist therefore should pay attention to how the talkers' ideas
about who their audienceis shapestheir conversation.This aspectof the relation of text and context has of course been the focus of a great deal of recent
theory from folklorists who conceive of folklore as "communication" based
on "performance." But despite Morton's awarenessof Maguire's story as a
collaborationbetween the two of them, he followed the accepted historical
editing practice and rearranged Maguire's answers according to topic,
whereupon he deleted his questions and departed, ghostlike, from the text.
The resulting personal history serves mainly as a vehicle for introducing the
songs in Maguire's repertoire,whose texts and tunes are printed. In a similar
vein is Roger Abrahams'A SingerandHer Songs,a book that contains important informationabout Almeda Riddle's song sourcesand her aestheticcriteria
as well as the texts and tunes of a large portion of her repertoire.Although the
Titon, FromBluesto Pop. The brochure notes to Lazy Bill Lucas,12" LP, Philo Records 1007 (North
Ferrisburg, Vt., 1974) contain Lucas' personal history.
31
Jeff Titon, "Living Blues Interview: Son House," Living Blues, No. 31 (Mar.-Apr. 1977), 14-22.
30

Robin Morton, Come Day, Go Day, God SendSunday(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973),
xii.
p.
32

THE LIFESTORY

287

book is in Riddle'sown words,Abrahamscorrectlyclaimsthatit centerson

"the waysin whichfolklorehaspersisted,emphasizingthe hows andwhys of
and transmission."33
We learnaboutGrannyRiddle'spersonal
performance
time
from
to
time
as
insofar
it bearson hersongs,but the editedprodhistory
uct is not meantto be a life history;andat timesone feelsin it the cumulative
effect of GrannyRiddle introducingher entire song repertoireat a folk
festival.
Two folkloricpersonalhistorieswhich do not concernthemselveswith
musiciansarefocusedon workas a meansof individualidentity.MeandFannie
is billedas the "oralautobiography"
of MainewoodsmanRalphThornton.34
(Fannie,his wife, is seldomon centerstage,but herpresenceis felt.) Resulting
from tape-recorded
conversations,it was editedby the interviewer,Wayne
Reuel Bean,who chronologizedand spliced,deletedhis questions,and then
suppliedcommentsfor continuity.If it deservesto be calledanautobiography,
it is becauseThorntonhimselfselectedthe materialfrom the interviews;and
this selectiongave Thorntona greaterdegreeof controlthanmost personal
historyinformantsareallowed.Bestregardedas a memoir,MeandFannieis an
unusuallyexternalaccount,with almostno referenceto Thornton'sinnerlife.
of hisworkadaylife,
Pageafterpagegoesby in whichhe recallsthe adventures
as
a
it
and
comes
as
a
the end of his
toward
cook;
mostly
surprisewhen,
chronicle,he casuallyobservesthat he does not like cooking.35Anotherpersonalhistoryconcernedmainlywith work is BruceJackson'sA Thief'sPrimer,
but here the accountis moreintrospective,andJackson,who in editingdid
not delete all his interviewer'squestions,shows himselfresponsiveto the
ironies of criminalpride and self-respectwhich permeatehis informant's
recollections.36

Evenwhen theyaremistakenlypresentedas stories,biography,oralhistory,

and the personalhistory sharea historicalratherthan fictionalbase. The
editingprocedures,the datagathering,the researchplans,and the resulting
publicationsare orientedtowardfactualaccuracy.The historicalmethodis
well suited to the folklorist seeking folk-culturalinformation.But it
sometimeshappensthat in doing fieldworkwe folkloristsfind ourselves
caughtup with the livesof ourinformants,not so muchbecauseof what they
33

A Singer and Her Songs, ed. Roger Abrahams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press,
1970), p. 147.
34 Me
35

36

and Fannie,ed. Wayne Reuel Bean, NortheastFolklore,14 (1973).

Ibid, p. 73.

Bruce Jackson, A ThiefjsPrimer(New York: Macmillan, 1969).

JEFFTODD TITON

288

cando, or what theyknow, but who theyare.In theirstoriesof personalexperience,they try to tell us.
TheLife Storyas a Fiction
Folkloristshavepublishedfew personaldocumentssensitiveto the fictive
situationin whicha persontellsthe storyof hisor
aspectsof the conversational
her life or a significantportion of it. I have arguedthat most personal
documentsin which the informantsupposedlyspeaksin his or herown voice
arehistoricalin nature,the folkloristdestroyingby designor accidentthe ficOne exceptionis Linda
tive potentialinherentin the originalconversations.
a
verbatim
Belt:
Four
Tobacco
the
in
Lives,
publicationof fourlife
Degh's People
stories,with briefanalysesof the stories,storytellers,andtheirbackgrounds.37
herreinterchangeably,
AlthoughDegh usesthe termslifestoryandlifehistory
inher
and
fieldandpublicationmethods
jection of standardanthropological
of converled herto publishthe transcripts
terestin the individualstorytellers
sationsin whichtheytoldher,andusuallya few friendsandfamilymembersas
as Hungarianimmigrantsin Canada.Reviewing
well, abouttheirexperiences
this book in FolkloreForum,Larry Danielson pointed out that "On
occasion... the informant'sremarksindicatethata questionhasbeenasked,
though not includedin the transcription,"and that probably"certain
andpublication.Such
betweentranscription
disappeared
speaker'sdesignations
detailsmaybe trivial,but theyassumeimportanceif we areto relyon texts as
of the
Now of coursethe meretranscription
uneditedand authoritative."38
at the
decide
must
for
one
spokenwordonto theprintedpageinvolvesediting,
very least how to render it, in prose or ethnopoetictranscription,for
example.39And even if one chooses the conventionalrenderingin prose
one must edit to the extent of insertingpunctuation,which, as
paragraphs,
anyonewho haseverdoneit knows, canleadto difficultdecisionsaboutemphasisand meaning.This aside,I take it that sincetherewas no reasonfor
them, the omissionsin Degh's publishedtranscriptwere editorialaccidents,
pureand simple.
life stories in the folkloric
How, then, is the dearthof unadulterated
literatureto be explained?The most insidiousreason,I haveargued,is the
37

See note 25.

38

FolkloreForum,9 (1976), 172-173.

39 For examples of ethnopoetic transcription,see Dennis Tedlock, FindingtheCenter(New York: Dial,

1972). See also the journal Akheringa:Ethnopoetics.

THE LIFESTORY

289

conflationof story with historyand the transformation

of the one into the
other. KennethGoldstein'sA Guidefor Field Workersin Folkloreis an interestingcasein point.Thoroughandusefulthoughit is, it exhibitstheclassic
difficultiesof approaching
fictionas if it were, or ought to be, history.Using
the frameworkof culturalanthropologyto approachthe "data" of folklore,
Goldsteinwrites:"One of the most importantcontributionswhich the field
workercanmaketo folklorestudiesis the gatheringof dataforusein personal
documents.As they applyto the fieldof folklore,suchdocumentsmay
history
be definedas thestoryof thelife(or somepartof it) of anindividualfolkloreinformant.The datafor thesedocumentsareobtainedmainlyby the useof interview methods... ."40(my italics).To be fair,Goldsteinelsewhereis sensitive
to the advantages
of a fictionalstancewhen he advocatesverbatimpublication
of interviewswhen the informantdescribesin detaila topicor activityof interestto folklorists,andwhen he revealshis preference
for the nondirective
interview.41Still, the Guide'sfolk-culturalorientationdominates,and the
would-befield-workercomesawaywith the clearimpression
thatlifestoriesof
traditionbearersought to be treatedas historicaldocuments.
Asidefromthe conflationof storyandhistory,othercausesmaybe citedto
asfichelpexplainthe scarcityof folkloriclife storiespresentedandinterpreted
tions. One is that folkloristsarebetterreadin contemporary
anthropological
verbal-arttheorythanin contemporary
literarytheory.Anotheris the debate
over the folkloristiclegitimacyof the personalexperiencestory.42Anotheris
the hit-and-run
to fieldwork,a methodbasedon the assumptionthat
approach
folkloreconsistsof items to be collectedon field trips.Armedwith findingaidsandeagerfor data,the hit-and-runfield-workeris like the botanistwho
Under
bringsbacka greatvarietyof specimensfor analysisandpreservation.
theseconditionsof efficiency,any life storiescollectedarelikelyto be mined
for traditionalelements,then storedon reelsof tapeuntil they areerasedfor
futurefield trips. Fortunately,this type of field collectingis on the wane,
thoughwhy someof us acceptit from-even encourageit in-our studentsis
beyondme. But as folkloristsincreasinglycome to developfriendshipswith
their informantsover severalmonths', even years', time, the word "informant" becomesinappropriately
impersonal.As thosefriendships
deepen,the
Kenneth S. Goldstein, A Guidefor Field Workersin Folklore(Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates,
1964), p. 121.
40

41

42

Ibid., pp. 123-124, 127.

See, for example, the specialdouble issue of theJournalof theFolkloreInstitute,14:1-2 (1977), which
is devoted to the personal experience story.

290

JEFFTODD TITON

opportunities for life story conversationsincrease. Seeking cultural information, the folklorist is likely to conceive of these conversationsas life history.
But if he is interestedin his friendas a person, and what it is that makeshim or
her a traditionbearer,he will look to the life storyas an expressionof personality and self-conception-the who and why ratherthanjust the what and how
of his friend's life.
Personalityis the main ingredientin the life story. It is a fiction,just like the
story; and even if the story is not factuallytrue, it is always true evidence of
the storyteller'spersonality.43The most interestinglife storiesexpose the inner
life, tell us about motives. Like all good autobiography,as opposed to mere
chronicling, the life story's singularachievementis that it affirmsthe identity
of the storytellerin the act of the telling.44The life story tells who one thinks
one is and how one thinks one came to be that way.
The naive listener might assumea life story to be a truthful, factualaccount
of the storyteller's life. The assumption is that the storyteller has only to
penetratethe fog of the past, and that once a life is honestly rememberedit can
be sincerelyrecounted.But the more sophisticatedlistenerunderstandsthat no
matter how sincere the attempt, rememberingthe past cannot renderit as it
was, not only becausememory is selective, but becausethe life storytelleris a
different person now than he was ten or thirty years ago; and he may not be
able to, or even want to, imagine that he was differentthen. The problem of
how much a person may change without losing his or her identity is the
greatestdifficultyfacing the life storyteller,whose chief concern, afterall, is to
affirm his identity and account for it.45So life storytelling is a fiction, a making, an orderedpast imposed by a present personalityupon a disorderedlife.
"I have changed
Yeats acknowledged in the preface to his Autobiographies,
nothing to my knowledge, and yet it must be that I havechangedmany things
without my knowledge."46We do not turn to Yeats's autobiographiesif we
want to know the facts of Yeats's life; we turn to them if we want to know
Yeats.
We can learn much from life stories. We can learnhow the traditionbearer
thinks of himself, and why he or she continues to make chairsor play the fid43

HarvardUniversityPress,1960),p. 1.
SeeRoy Pascal,DesignandTruthinAutobiography
(Cambridge:

44 See Patricia
45

46

Meyer Spacks, Imagininga Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 1.

See Spacks, p. 28. Her analysis of autobiography as a genre is outstanding.

Preface to Reveriesover Childhoodand Youth (1914), in The Autobiographyof William Butler Yeats

(New York: Collier Books, 1965).

THELIFESTORY

291

die or preachas the Spirit moves. What is it about this person, we ask, that
makeshim an artistin the face of all the pressuresto stop? What makeshim an
exceptionalartist?Obviously his self-conception,who he thinks he is, is greatly responsiblefor what he does. We get behind the mere facts of his life, the
historicaldata, when we let him tell his story. So conceived, the life story need
not be "used" for folk-culturalinformationor as a "specimen" of oral performance or as "data" for oral history.
The life story need not be "used" for anything, becausein the telling it is a
self-sufficientand self-containedfiction. Fictions go on all the time, as Gertrude Stein pointed out: "I do not cannot believe that anything is or can be
more interesting than the fact that everybodyis always telling everything and
that anybody can in their way go on listening or not go on listening. But
everybodycan feel about telling and about listening like that. Anybodycan."47
We arecurious, and the life story is intrinsicallyinteresting. If not, we do not
listen. If it is interesting and we do listen we are moved with pleasure.Stein
also wrote that, "If you live a daily life every minute of the day the description
of that daily life every day must be moving, it must fill you with complete
emotion, and it must at the same time be soothing."48The life story told to a
sympathetic listener is a fiction complete in itself. The trouble with most
poets, Wordsworth wrote, was that they could not fix their gaze steadily
upon their subject.49They jumped away too quickly, classifiedit, transformed
it, used it. Let us not use the life story too quickly;let us know it first. Charles
Olson had this in mind when he wrote:
... that a thing, any thing, impinges on us by a more important fact, its self-existence,
without referenceto any other thing, in short, the very characterof it which calls our attention to it, which wants us to know more about it, its particularity.That is what we are confronted by, not the thing's "class," any hierarchy,of quality or quantity, but the thing itself,
and its relevanceto ourselveswho are the experienceof it (whatever it may mean to someone
else, or whatever other relations it may have).50

An approachto the life story which recognizes its validity as a fiction, quite
47

GertrudeStein,Narration:FourLectures(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress,1935), p. 35.

48

Ibid., pp. 4-5.

"I haveat all timesendeavoured

to look steadilyat my subject,"wrote Wordsworthin the 1805
of concreteexperience,
prefaceto LyricalBallads,implyingthathe took his ideasfromcloseobservation
not fromliteraryconvention.
49

50 Charles
Olson, "HumanUniverse,"in Human Universeand OtherEssays,ed. DonaldAllen(New
York:GrovePress,1967), p. 6.

292

JEFFTODD TITON

apartfrom its value as a historicaldocument, places it squarelyin the human

universeabout which Olson was writing, a universewhich is enlarged,even as
we are enlarged,by the complementarystancesof finding out and making, of
history and fiction.
Tufts University
Medford,Massachusetts