But it makes me think about PKM. I love the book from when I first read it in the early oughts. But think about it - all of the other oral histories that have come along, from SNL to the Daily Show. I wonder how much they modeled their approach on PKM, or was the oral history approach already strong and I just happened to dip in with that particular one?
I associate the oral history genre with Studs Terkel and he was decades before that. There have been dozens, maybe hundreds, since then that show up when I put “oral history” into bookfinder.
I’d go back to the WPA during the New Deal. A lot of writers and historians (including Terkel) were hired by the government to collect oral histories. This brought the concept into the historiographic mainstream.
True, but what WordMan refers to is a style of telling a history by cutting together paragraphs from dozens of different people to form a narrative. Technically, that’s not what Terkel did either. He strung together short chapters from lots of people, built up into sections, to give individual perceptions of a larger theme.
I don’t know who did the paragraph style first. It definitely predates McNeil, as drad dog shows. That was a major work. It’s also used by Peter Golenbock in 1984’s Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers. My sense is that it was well established by the end of the 80s.
I’d still say that Turkel’s oral histories were extremely influential in publishing. If they didn’t actually start the trend, they made it possible.
Yes, that’s what I’m after. I read Edie - and it’s safe to assume that cool kids Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, PKM’s authors did, too. But it’s almost the Velvet Underground to PKM’s The Ramones - influential to PKM, but without nearly as broad a shadow.
I was thinking about Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his oral history of movie-making in the 70’s, but that came out after PKM by 2 years.