What Happens When People Are Given A Voice?
Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode The Act Of Listening
Over 20 years ago, Dave Isay's radio documentary Ghetto Life 101 was broadcast. It presented voices many public radio listeners hardly ever hear, setting a standard for storytellers everywhere.
About Dave Isay
Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps, an audio project that has collected more than 50,000 personal interviews. The archives of StoryCorps are kept at the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center, and constitute the largest single collection of recorded voices in history.
StoryCorps invites friends and loved ones to conduct 40-minute interviews at small recording booths across the country. Offering moving and surprising glimpses into the lives of often marginalized and forgotten subjects, the interviews are a familiar feature of NPR's Morning Edition and Storycorps.org.
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Transcript
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So about 20 years ago, millions of people heard this voice for the very first time.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "GHETTO LIFE 101")
LEALAN JONES: Good morning. Day one. Walking to school, leaving out the door.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOG BARKING)
LEALAN: This is my dog Ferocious. You know why he got that name if you hear him bark.
RAZ: The boy in this recording is LeAlan Jones. He was 13 at the time. It was 1993 and he lived in one of the most violent neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side. A local public radio station gave LeAlan and a friend tape recorders to make a documentary about their lives. The music you're hearing, by the way, is part of that documentary and it was called "Ghetto Life 101."
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "GHETTO LIFE 101")
LEALAN: I see the ghetto every day walking to school.
RAZ: And it was basically half an hour of this kid, LeAlan.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "GHETTO LIFE 101")
LEALAN: My name's LeAlan Jones and I'm 13 years old.
RAZ: And his friend, Lloyd.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "GHETTO LIFE 101")
LLOYD NEWMAN: This is Lloyd Newman and I'm 14 years old.
RAZ: Just walking through a normal week in their lives.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "GHETTO LIFE 101")
LEALAN: This is our story.
RAZ: It was such a simple idea and yet in 1993, this was totally new - first-person storytelling from two African-American teenagers.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "GHETTO LIFE 101")
LEALAN: We've been friends since first grade.
LLOYD: That's seven years.
DAVE ISAY: I was interested in the idea of people having the chance to be listened to and tell their stories.
RAZ: Dave Isay was the producer behind "Ghetto Life 101." But he actually doesn't appear in the documentary at all because Dave wanted LeAlan and Lloyd to tell their own stories.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "GHETTO LIFE 101")
LEALAN: We're both in eighth grade. When I was 10, I seen my first automatic weapon, a Glock 9.
LLOYD: I've seen all kinds of guns.
RAZ: Now today, a lot of public radio shows and podcasts are about listening to incredible stories from ordinary people, but Dave Isay was one of the very first to do this kind of work.
D. ISAY: Part of what I was trying to do in these documentaries that I always found that my voice - if I was there, it kind of pulled you out of this place. And what I was trying to do is have people go to a place where they felt like they were very connected to whoever was talking.
RAZ: And that led to things that you would never hear in a traditional documentary, things like the moment when LeAlan interviews his mom and just asks her in this incredibly casual way...
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "GHETTO LIFE 101")
LEALAN: Who is my father?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Your father is a fellow named Toby Flipper (ph). He seen you. He know you exist. He seen you when you was about 2, and I ain't seen him since.
LEALAN: What do you think happened to him?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: He probably dead.
LEALAN: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: OK.
RAZ: And then there's also this moment, when LeAlan interviews his grandma. And she loved gospel music.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "GHETTO LIFE 101")
LEALAN: And of all the songs she knows, the one she loves the most is called "One Day At A Time."
Could you please sing that song for us?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Well, my voice all messed up.
LEALAN: Do it. One, two. One, two, three.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (Singing) Do you remember when you walked among men?
RAZ: Listening to a recording like this is a way, in a sense, to learn something from someone born in a different time or a different place.
D. ISAY: LeAlan often says that everything he needs to know in life is contained in those recordings of his grandmother.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "GHETTO LIFE 101")
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (Singing) One day at a time.
LEALAN: She was hoarse, but she still can blow. Thank you.
D. ISAY: You know, hearing a story from someone who you might've thought was very different than you on the radio, in the car, with your headphones on and recognizing a little bit of yourself in that person has tremendous potential to build bridges of understanding between people and hopefully someday to move the needle on helping us recognize the power, grace and beauty in the stories we'll find all around us when we take the time to listen.
RAZ: Our show today is all about that, all about listening and ideas about what we can learn when we listen to people and to places that are almost never heard, listening as an act of generosity and also a path to discovery. Later in the show, the story of how Dave Isay created a project dedicated to this idea. You might've heard of it. It's called StoryCorps, which is now working to give people everywhere a new way to listen to each other.
(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)
D. ISAY: Imagine for example, a national homework assignment where every high school student studying U.S. history across the country records an interview with an elder over Thanksgiving so that in one single weekend, an entire generation of American lives and experiences are captured. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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