The interview that I chose was the one with Uncle Bob Ledbetter. He seemed to me to be a very kind, older man with a positive outlook on his life. The tone of his voice was cheerful and pleasant. Without the audio recording, it would be more difficult to discern his feelings when he spoke. The audio transcript gives a general idea of how he might have spoken, and the tone he used, but the audio recording gives a clearer picture.
Another way in which the recording is useful is in examining the accents of African Americans at the time. This is a topic that has come up more than once in our class readings. Transcripts cannot portray the nuances of an accent. This is an issue that came up in Lauren Tilton’s article, “Race and Place”. She noted how the interviewers for the ex-slave narratives solidified the many different accents of the interviewees into one general accent.1 With the audio recording, there’s little need for an inaccurate, accented transcript because the accent can be heard clearly and accurately through the audio. Because of this, these recordings are a valuable resource for linguists who wish to study the dialects, accents, and speech patterns of African Americans during the early 20th century. 2 Many of the recordings are not well made, unfortunately. I went through several different interviews before I chose Bob Ledbetter’s, and many of them had sound issues. However, from the bits and pieces that are clear, they give an accurate depiction of the different ways that African Americans spoke at the time.
Bob Ledbetter’s interview did not specifically go into a lot of detail about his experiences as a slave. He was born in 1861, the same year the Civil War started, and he was only four years old when it ended in 1865. However, it is clear that despite being technically free, he did not reap all the benefits. He never went to school, and he never learned basic math skills. He could only read because his father taught him, and later on he taught himself how to write. As a grown man, it appears that a great deal of his work involved cotton picking and other manual labor. Even though he was a freed man, he did not have the opportunities of a white man. 3
What surprised me about this interview was how cheerful Bob was. He talked about the songs he used to sing, he laughed and was very friendly. What surprised me the most was his opinion of the people he worked for, the Norris family. He described Mr. Norris as “the meanest man there was around”, and yet he claims that he was never mistreated. It’s possible that he glossed over the Norris family because of the interviewer John Lomax, who was white. However, he may have been telling the truth. It’s difficult to know. 4
The timeline that I created is simple and small, because Bob Ledbetter gave very little concrete information about the events in his life. Most of the events I figured out through some basic subtraction and guesswork. The second timeline layer consisted of the dates of the beginning and end of the Civil War, the Stock Market Crash, and the Outbreak of WW2. Usually historians tend to focus on the large events of history, and ignore the smaller, more personal events of lesser-known individuals. My timeline takes Bob Ledbetter’s personal history and sets it against the backdrop of these large events in history. I believe that adding them both together gives them both context, and it allows for a fuller picture of history.
Timeline Links:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YUvdDq2A0NgtyE-r-55cbmag8lcF51GmY-Odjl1J4Hc/edit#gid=0
- Tilton, Lauren. “Race and Place: Dialect and the Construction of Southern Identity in the Ex-Slave Narratives.” Current Research in Digital History, 1 Jan. 2019, http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v02-14-race-and-place/.
- “About This Collection : Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories : Digital Collections : Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/voices-remembering-slavery/about-this-collection/.
- “Interview with Uncle Bob Ledbetter, Oil City, Louisiana, 1940.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1940003_afs03992a/.
- “Interview with Uncle Bob Ledbetter, Oil City, Louisiana, 1940.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1940003_afs03992a/.
