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As she sat at the kitchen table with her husband in their Sunderland home, sharing their decades of experience recording American folklore around the Appalachians, Carrie Klein found herself watching the birds on their front porch.
Over the course of more than 6,000 interviews over 30 years of work, you tend to learn something about people, and Carrie Klein noticed that, like her avian visitors, a common thread connects us all.
“We’re all different and that’s okay; it makes life interesting,” Carrie Klein said. “We have different colors of birds that I look at, and different ways of climbing and flying and eating, different likes and dislikes, but what we have in common is more important.”
After meeting in the Pioneer Valley in the early 1990s, Carrie, 56, and Michael Klein, 83, spent 30 years together traveling through the Appalachians while highlighting the family histories, traditions and stories that paint a vivid picture of the people, living there. Decades after meeting in western Massachusetts, the couple returned to replant their roots here in 2020 and continue to produce their Talking Across the Lines podcast.
Not content to spend their time just recording their own work, two Franklin County towns have hired the pair to train volunteers and record interviews for their 350th anniversaries. Carrie and Michael were first contacted by Northfield and began working with volunteers for this project. Among those volunteers was a Deerfield resident who then put the Kleins in touch with Deerfield’s 350 organizers, who now introduced the pair to an oral history project for that city.
“We think one of the most effective ways to help this old world move more peacefully is for people to be heard, to feel heard, to really feel heard, and to help people find their own voice.” Carrie said. “And then to share those voices in the context of others.”
Along with their produced and cleanly edited work for shows and podcasts, the Kleins said the most important tool for sharing these voices in context is the raw interviews, which are often stored in public places like libraries so that anyone can access and to study.
“The most obvious way is what we call a ‘voice bank,'” Michael said. “There will be these unedited, full interviews in a voice bank that will be available to the community at all times.”
In Northfield, the Dickinson Memorial Library is the community voice bank for their 350th oral history project, while the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) will serve as Deerfield’s bank.
Verbal testimony, the Kleins said, carries a much stronger message than what can be read in a newspaper or on the Internet, because you can discern further meaning from someone’s words when you hear their tone of voice and the delivery of words.
“It’s just as important how people say it as what they say,” Michael said. “How they say is often lost in print. You certainly don’t understand it in the same way as hearing someone speak from the heart about their life, their family, or things that are important.”
Listening for change
Through their work, the pair have developed an interviewing technique – which they have also turned into a workshop – called ‘Listening for Change’. The key point for the interviewer is to avoid putting any pressure or direction on where the person wants to go with their story.
“When we teach it, one of the things we say is, ‘We don’t know what this person is really an expert at. We know that everyone is an expert in their own experience,’ … Interviewing is an act of humility,” Carey said. “It’s amazing what people will tell you when you don’t ask them.”
Michael stressed that their interviews are not the ones people imagine journalists or job interviewers should conduct, where it’s a “barrage of questions” being fired, but rather it’s a chance for a person to tell their story. their own unique story that can only be shared by them.
“I don’t think that getting permission to do an interview with someone gives you the right to go shopping or go to a big store or anything like that,” Michael said. “All of our interviews start the same way no matter who we’re talking to, which is, ‘Tell us about your people and where you grew up,’ and it goes from there.”
The goal of the project, Carey emphasized, is to “always give a voice to people whose voices have not been heard … When, frankly, no one has been heard in this way: continuously, without question.”
This method has been applied to local communities as they embark on a year-long effort to record oral history among them. In Northfield, it was Centennial House owners and 350th anniversary committee members Joan and Steve Stoya who urged the couple to help preserve the town’s myriad stories ahead of the 2023 birthday celebrations.
Joanne Stoya, who was among those trained to interview their neighbors, said the Kleins are “remarkable” people who helped launch a project that will protect and enhance Northfield’s history.
“They’re just kind and smart and experienced and can put their finger on the pulse of what the person is saying just by continuing to encourage them,” Stoya said. “They have a perfect way of saying, ‘Tell me more about this,’ and they get more.”
Results and future
These comprehensive interviews are then edited and produced for each setting in which the Kleins work. When working in Appalachia, they compiled audio CDs—composed of interviews and recorded folk songs related to the period they were researching—radio broadcasts and newspaper articles. As their work continued, they jumped into the 21st century with podcasts, where they now continue their work today.
Like a weaver, turning these interviews into a cohesive project is often about unraveling a web of interconnected stories and histories. Carey said the goal, beyond sharing these stories, is to provoke a “deeper community dialogue” both between the people who live there and the world at large.
“You get these amazing testimonies, these really moments of personal transformation. People are rethinking or thinking more deeply about their own experiences,” Carey said. “You have these riches, these references that you can weave together.”
Some of those treasures have already been found in Northfield, where Stoya said she and other volunteers trained by Kleins have conducted about 40 interviews for their project, with more to come. She thanked the couple for their help and for “working superbly” with the city.
“I could go on,” about how helpful the Kleins have been, Stoya said with a laugh. “The area is rich in meaning and Klein are great at highlighting that meaning and bringing it to light.”
For Northfield and Deerfield’s 350th anniversary, the towns plan to take all of their oral history interviews and identify common threads between them to develop additional programs to run throughout the year.
Asked what keeps them going after decades of work and thousands of interviews, Michael said simply.
“I’m a fool for a good story,” he said.
More information about the Klines’ work and their expertise can be found on their website: folktalk.org.
Chris Larrabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com or 413-930-4081.
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