Copyright © 2026 OyList. All Rights Reserved.
Share
Items18
1
John Lomax
Born
John Lomax, a Texas folklorist, became curator of the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song in 1933 and drove thousands of miles with a disc recorder weighing over 300 pounds, recording singers in prisons, farms and churches, including Lead Belly at Angola prison. His methods, and his control over the singers he promoted, are criticised today, but the recordings he made form the archive's foundation.
More about John Lomax2
Alan Lomax
Born
Alan Lomax began recording with his father John in 1933 and went on to record for decades across the American South, the Caribbean, Britain, Spain and Italy, including long spoken interviews with Jelly Roll Morton in 1938. He left more than 17,000 tracks, now at the Library of Congress and published free online by the Association for Cultural Equity, which he founded. His later projects sought to return recordings to the communities they came from.
More about Alan Lomax3
Séamus Ó Duilearga
Séamus Ó Duilearga directed the Irish Folklore Commission from its founding in 1935, sending full-time collectors with notebooks and Ediphone recorders to storytellers across rural Ireland, especially in Irish-speaking areas. In 1937 and 1938 the Schools' Collection had some 50,000 children write down local lore from their families. Now held at University College Dublin, much of the archive is digitised through the Dúchas project.
More about Séamus Ó Duilearga4
Roy Plomley
Born
Roy Plomley devised Desert Island Discs for BBC radio in 1942 and presented almost 1,800 editions until his death in 1985, asking guests to choose eight records and talk about their lives between them. The simple format drew out unguarded conversation, and the programme continues with later presenters. The BBC has put a large part of the back catalogue online, a long record of how public figures told their own stories.
More about Roy Plomley5
Séamus Ennis
Born
Séamus Ennis, an uilleann piper, worked as a full-time collector for the Irish Folklore Commission from 1942, transcribing songs and tunes by hand across Connemara, Donegal and the Hebrides, then for the BBC's folk music recording scheme from 1951, capturing singers in Ireland and Britain. As a musician himself, he knew what to ask and how to put performers at ease. His recordings are held by the Irish Folklore archive and the British Library.
More about Séamus Ennis6
Allan Nevins
Born
Allan Nevins, a Columbia University historian, founded the Columbia Oral History Research Office in 1948, the first organised programme of its kind, after worrying that telephones were replacing the letters historians relied on. Its early interviews were mostly with business and political leaders, a bias later projects corrected, but its practice of recording, transcribing and letting interviewees review transcripts set the template. The collection is now one of the largest in the United States.
More about Allan Nevins7
Hamish Henderson
Born
Hamish Henderson, a poet and folklorist, helped found the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1951 and spent decades recording Travellers, farm workers and Gaelic and Scots singers with a tape recorder, including the ballad singer Jeannie Robertson, whom he brought to wider notice. His recordings and those of colleagues are freely available through the Tobar an Dualchais project.
More about Hamish Henderson8
Studs Terkel
Born
Studs Terkel hosted a daily radio programme on Chicago's WFMT from 1952 to 1997, interviewing writers, musicians, activists and people he met for his oral history books. The surviving tapes, around 5,000 hours, are held by the Chicago History Museum, digitised with the Library of Congress and freely available as the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, an unusually broad record of twentieth-century American voices famous and unknown.
More about Studs Terkel9
George Plimpton
Born
George Plimpton, as founding editor of The Paris Review from 1953, built the Writers at Work interviews into a long-running series in which novelists and poets discussed their methods at length, often revising the transcripts themselves for accuracy. Interviews with Hemingway, Faulkner, Toni Morrison and hundreds more are kept free to read in the magazine's online archive, one of the richest records of how writers work.
More about George Plimpton10
Willa Baum
Born
Willa Baum joined the Regional Oral History Office at the University of California, Berkeley's Bancroft Library at its founding in 1954 and directed it from 1958 to 2000, overseeing long life-history interviews with Californians from vintners and engineers to suffragists and conservationists. Her handbooks, such as Oral History for the Local Historical Society, taught thousands of volunteers how to plan, record, release and index interviews properly.
More about Willa Baum11
Charles Parker (producer)
Charles Parker, a BBC radio producer in Birmingham, recorded hours of interviews with railway workers, fishermen, miners and road builders for the Radio Ballads he made with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger from 1958, which wove the actuality recordings with new songs. He kept the raw tapes, and the Charles Parker Archive at the Library of Birmingham preserves them, a rare record of working people's speech in mid-century Britain.
More about Charles Parker (producer)12
John Freeman (British politician)
Born
John Freeman, a former Labour minister, conducted the BBC's Face to Face interviews from 1959 to 1962, with the camera close on the guest and Freeman mostly unseen. His patient, searching questions drew Carl Jung, Martin Luther King Jr., Evelyn Waugh and a famously tearful Gilbert Harding. The series survives almost complete and is often rebroadcast, a model of the long television interview.
More about John Freeman (British politician)13
Claude Lanzmann
Born
Claude Lanzmann spent eleven years, from 1974, filming interviews with survivors, bystanders and perpetrators of the Holocaust for Shoah, a nine-and-a-half-hour film with no archive footage. He sometimes filmed former Nazis with a hidden camera, a practice that raises consent questions. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired his roughly 220 hours of outtakes, now digitised and transcribed for researchers.
More about Claude Lanzmann14
Terry Gross
Terry Gross has hosted Fresh Air, from WHYY in Philadelphia, since 1975, conducting an estimated 15,000 or more interviews with writers, musicians, actors and experts, marked by careful preparation and questions about craft and personal history. The programme's archive of past interviews is searchable online, a running record of American culture across five decades.
More about Terry Gross15
Brian Lamb
Born
Brian Lamb founded C-SPAN in 1979 to broadcast Congress unedited, and from 1989 to 2004 hosted Booknotes, hour-long interviews with authors of non-fiction, asking plain, brief questions and letting them talk. He later hosted Q&A. The C-SPAN Video Library holds these and decades of other unedited footage, free to search, a resource historians and journalists use to check what was actually said.
More about Brian Lamb16
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of London's Serpentine galleries, began recording conversations with artists, architects and scientists in the early 1990s and has kept going for decades, amassing thousands of hours in what he calls the Interview Project. Many appear in his Interviews volumes and the Conversation Series books, giving a large first-hand record of how contemporary artists think.
More about Hans Ulrich Obrist17
Steven Spielberg
Born
Steven Spielberg founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994, after making Schindler's List, to video-record Holocaust survivors and witnesses while they could still speak. Trained volunteer interviewers recorded nearly 52,000 testimonies in 56 countries and around 40 languages within a few years. Now the USC Shoah Foundation, its indexed archive has expanded to other genocides and is used in schools and research worldwide.
More about Steven Spielberg18
David Isay
Born
Dave Isay, a radio documentary maker, opened the first StoryCorps booth in New York's Grand Central Terminal in 2003, where two people who know each other record a forty-minute conversation with a facilitator. Participants sign releases and choose whether to make it public. More than 600,000 people have taken part, and the recordings are deposited at the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center.
More about David Isay
