Oral History Interviews as Primary Sources

While conducting the research for God Rock, Inc., I was fortunate to interview many current and former Christian music industry executives and musicians. Before I embarked on this research, my PhD advisor had warned me that music professionals are typically used to delivering the same talking points or stories to interviewers, who are usually journalists, and that it might be difficult to get them to open up into more reflection. With this in mind, when I reached out to potential interview subjects I always explained my project as scholarly research, distinguishing it from journalistic reporting. I also explained how I got their contact info, especially if a colleague of theirs had connected the two of us. Once I sat down with my interviewees, however, I found that they were very willing to speak openly about their experiences and beliefs. Perhaps that is a factor of their relative position within the music industries: most of my interviewees were indie bandmembers or executives who did not interact often with the press. Or, perhaps it is a characteristic of the Christian music industries and less common in the general market.

With each interview, I started off our meeting by asking them to tell me a personal history that explained how they got to where the are today. I find this oral history technique to be very rewarding, because it allows me to let the interviewee lead the discussion, addressing periods and events in their life that they find particularly important and significant. During this first part of the interview I try not to interject, although at times I do ask for clarification. Then I usually double-back to topics that sounded like particularly fruitful avenues to solicit more detail, guided by the interviewee’s interests, my own research objectives, and intuition. For these kinds of interviews, I do come prepared with a list of questions to use in case our conversation flags, but I rarely find myself referring to it. The longer I do this, the better I get at voicing penetrating (but not invasive) follow-up questions, prompting my interviewees to reflect a bit deeper on their own stories.

When I started this research I felt pretty confident in my interviewing skills, which we honed in the coursework and training for my ethnomusicology PhD program. But our ethnographic research methods courses did not introduce or otherwise prepare me for archival research, and searching for relevant materials in archives to contextualize the ethnographic data I was collecting was somewhat of an afterthought at the time. Nonetheless, I have since learned that archival materials are valuable to the triangulation that ethnographers so frequently find ourselves doing, by substantiating truth claims or providing new data points that might turn the ethnographic research toward a more refined direction or objective. I learned about archival research by doing it, paging through dozens and dozens of issues of the Christian music fanzines, magazines, business records, and other documents housed at Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Popular Music. Now, because of my own experiences as a researcher, I think it is imperative to train ethnographers in both archival methods and quantitative methods (particularly those used by sociologists), although I struggle to do little more than introduce each of those subjects when I teach ethnographic methods myself.

I was thrilled to discover Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History, which has been recording and preserving interviews of notable alumni and community members since the 1970s. The Institute’s interviewers spoke with Jarrell McCracken (1927-2007), founder and longtime president of Word Records, five times between 1971 and 1976; the transcripts run to 278 pages. In truth, I have barely scratched the surface of the McCracken interviews. Kurt Kaiser (1934-2018), a significant Christian musician, composer, and executive spoke with the Institute in the late 1980s; I have barely looked at the transcripts of those interviews. But the transcripts of three interviews with Billy Ray Hearn (1929-2015), conducted in the late 1990s, were incredibly valuable for my project. Hearn had collaborated with Kaiser while working for McCracken at Word, where he launched the CCM subsidiary Myrrh Records in 1972 before moving to Los Angeles and founding Sparrow Records in 1976. His interviews with the Institute for Oral History fleshed out a lot of the history that I was reading in secondary sources (like Larry Eskridge’s God’s Forever Family) and had spoken about with him in our interview at his home outside Nashville in 2010.