Listen: Transcript
[Phil Cook & His Feet's (2011a) "Ballad of a Hungry Mother" from Hungry Mother Blues plays in the background.]
Stone: It should come as no surprise that work in a sonic archive requires a lot of listening.8 8 Can deaf or hard-of-hearing researchers study sonic archives? That question has not been the focus of my study, but my experience working in archives leads me to believe that they could. There is more to sonic archives than sound. Continued structural changes are needed to make this work more accessible and conspicuous. Large archives such as the Library of Congress include robust transcripts alongside their audio holdings. There remains important work to do to ensure that sonic archives offer the same (or adjacent) research potentials for both abled and disabled bodies. Be prepared to spend many, many hours listening to archival material. This is not to say that other kinds of research isn't time-consuming, but listening-as-research presents a different experience when compared with traditional methods and has its own unique challenges. With the Vera Hall recordings, once I had downloaded and transferred them to my iPhone, I began several weeks of both active and passive listening. In the first few auditions, I listened to the four hours of material with the goal of getting to know it generally. I would listen during my commute to work, during walks around my campus, or while I was preparing meals and other mundane tasks. This more casual listening was helpful in getting a larger, general sense of what the archive had to offer. With occasional prompts from Alan Lomax, Hall tells a number of stories and anecdotes from her life interspersed with songs. Nearly all are interesting in some way, so I knew choices about how to shorten and edit would be difficult.
After completing the initial, more passive listen-throughs, I needed to begin thinking about the framing of my historical project. This led to more active, purposeful listening where I made notes and began drafting a plan about what stories and songs I thought were most important for listeners to hear, and especially which parts of the archive both resound with and re-sound the received history of Hall.9 9 I also read Stephen Wade's (2012) chapter on Hall in his award-winning book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, as well as Lomax's biography of Hall, told in the first half of his 1959 book The Rainbow Sign. Much like Mister Jelly Roll, Lomax's better-known biography of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, The Rainbow Sign is a literary rendering of Lomax's recorded conversations with Hall—the very ones now available digitally at the ACE archive. The Rainbow Sign is an imperfect but important resource on Hall and her history. Vera is "Nora" in the book, and there are parts of her story not included in the available recordings drawn from tapes now lost, or from Hall's interviews with Ruby Pickens Tartt, with whom Lomax said Hall was more comfortable sharing more private parts of her story. Here is where the larger methodological ideals from feminist historiography came into use: I wanted to be sure that Vera Hall's agency, creativity, and humanity were represented by the choices I made. Much of her recorded material is rich and compelling with any number of usable pieces, so crafting a more concise narrative from the available tape is the primary challenge of the writer/audio editor. There was no way that I was going to be able to use all four hours in my chapter, so I needed to find elements from the collection that would give reader-listeners a sense of Hall as a person and how her life experiences shaped her values and, therefore, her rhetoric. In the end, I tried to create a sonic history that was both compelling and accessible. At 60 minutes, the piece is actually a little longer than I planned initially, but—taking a cue from all of the wonderful radio programs resounding through Jessica Abel's (2015) recent graphic narrative book Out on a Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio—I decided to shoot for an hour-length production. Basically, one episode of a typical NPR-style radio program.
Abel's book deftly relates the difficult work of a professional audio editor working to create a short, listenable narrative from a much larger store of available tape. In the book, producers of popular radio programs like This American Life, Radiolab, and Snap Judgment advise novice soundwriters in the various tasks of sequencing, scene-making, signposting and editing, fine-tuning and otherwise producing sound stories. Joe Richman of Radio Diaries describes the process of story editing thusly. He says,
You get all this tape, you get 40 hours of tape or whatever, and you break it apart into little…into atoms [ellipsis original]. And then you try to find a way to fit it all back together.… [W]e organize the tape, start to cut it down. We put like things together, and then start to build different scenes. (Abel, 2015, p. 116)
Initially, for the Hall story that follows, I wanted to have three distinct but related audio scenes: one on play, another on family, and a final one on church. The challenge is that she talks and sings about all of these things in several different places throughout the four hours of tape, and often all at the same time. But with those scenic bones of the narrative in place, I could start listening for the parts of her story that I might use that would best support the narrative arc that I constructed but still highlight those three main subjects. Once selected, those clips could then be lined up, edited, and fine-tuned using an audio editor so that they sound more or less cohesive in the mix. Novice soundwriters should be aware that for even the most talented and professional sound editors, this work takes hours (and hours!), so take heart, and start editing!