Throughout everyone’s educational careers, the mistake of slavery is taught over and over and over again. We learn about those who fought to abolish it, about those who didn’t, and about what the slaves were used for. However, very rarely are the voices of the actual slaves heard. By listening to the audio tracks in this collection, it makes it that much more real that the slaves were real life people, with real life memories, and real lives. And that realization just makes the history of slavery all that much more awful, even though it already was before. In the interview with Uncle Bob Ledbetter 1, a former slave, Ledbetter describes quick memories he has of his life, but he doesn’t even remember his own birthday. He claims he never knew it. He never learned to read or write either. It just shows such a stark contrast of the way people live today and the way things once were. Thus, there’s usefulness in that it demonstrates a sort of more active level of history. It’s not just text that one is reading about things that happened in the past. The listener actually gets to hear the voice of history, which is all that much more powerful. This mimics the story told through Jennifer Rittenhouse’s novel as well, where a man travels through the south, interviewing the people of an ever changing America 2.
For the timeline included above, the major thing that becomes apparent once there’s a visualization of Bob Ledbetter’s history is that there’s not much “history” to it. So, upon realizing that, it makes one thing differently of the interview that was conducted. It’s no question that Bob Ledbetter had more history. He was a 73 year old man by the time the interview was conducted, but one can question why more of his memories weren’t recorded. Then when listening to the interview and how it was recorded, the listener realizes it’s because it was a white man recording the interview and dominating the conversation. The interviewer who interviewed Uncle Bob Ledbetter was John A. Lomax. Now, this isn’t to say Lomax purposely dominated every aspect of the interview in a malicious way, however Lomax repeatedly asked Ledbetter to sing the same song, when he could have asked him to tell him about a memory from when he was younger. So with that being said, why would Ledbetter speak about something he wasn’t asked about, when he was raised in a way in which black people were taught to do as the white man said. Consciously or subconsciously, those sort of things effected all the interviews in this collection. Of course, this shouldn’t take away from the collection. It is still a valuable piece of history that can be used in many different ways, however it does make one realize how the culture and social customs of a certain time most definitely effect the way history is recorded, and one must keep that in mind when evaluating any sort of historical account.
