Russell B. Long Papers, Mss 3700, LLMVC.
Williams, shown here with Senator Russell Long, used oral histories for his biography of Huey Long (seen in photograph).
If ever there was a legendary teacher at LSU, it was T. Harry Williams, who brought unaccustomed excitement to the history department from 1941 until 1979.
Williams didn’t look like a legend. A slight, balding, bespectacled man who puffed on a pipe, he nonetheless mesmerized students with his dramatic and witty accounts of moments long past.
Williams had it all—meticulous attention to detail merged with the soul of a raconteur. He was a Boyd Professor by 1953, and way before that he had students practically fighting to get into his classes.
“Williams would engage his auditors with rapid-fire volleys in a conversational voice off the cuff without lectern, text, or notes,” recalled student Harold McSween. “He knew what he wanted to say, and he said it without missing a beat.”
It wasn’t easy getting into a course taught by T. Harry, as he was universally known. Students arranged their schedules around his classes on the Civil War and southern history. Those who were not so lucky often gathered in the hallway outside the classroom, straining to catch the words as they fell from his lips.
“He was just so natural,” said Winnie Byrd, a student in the 1940s. In a taped interview, Byrd recalled, “He was very informal in his attire as well as his manner, but he was very structured. … He had that gorgeous sense of humor that would just crack you up … He was so captivating that he didn’t have to work hard to hold your attention, really.”
In addition to teaching, Williams was widely published and well reviewed. His 1952 study Lincoln and His Generals was a Book of the Month Club selection. But all his previous works were eclipsed by Huey Long, published in 1969 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the National Book Award for history and biography.
But all his previous works were eclipsed by Huey Long, published in 1969 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the National Book Award for history and biography.
Exhaustively researched and crisply written, the Long book pioneered the use of oral history. Lugging a thirty-pound Webster Electric Ekotape reel-to-reel tape recorder, Williams tracked down and talked to some 295 persons, both pro- and anti-Long, during the dozen years he worked on the book.
Each interview had to be transcribed, a task that often fell to Williams’s wife Estelle, who taught English at LSU.
Exhaustively researched and crisply written, the Long book pioneered the use of oral history.
In the decade that followed the publication of Huey Long, the idea of taped recollections gained acceptance. "It's no secret that I am a great believer in oral history,” wrote Williams. “Trained researchers using a tape recorder ought to interview people to get the information that is in their heads and no place else."
When Williams died in 1979 at age seventy, the Board of Supervisors established the T. Harry Williams Chair of American History, and a scholarship fund was created in his name.
Estelle Williams (who would live to be ninety) became the keeper of the flame. She donated his books and papers to the LSU Libraries Special Collections. Among his effects were twenty tapes of his Huey Long interviews. (Williams had frugally recycled the tapes, using them again and again.)
When LSU established an oral-history center, it seemed only fitting to name it after the man who had helped make the technique respectable. The T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History opened at Hill Memorial Library in 1991. In its eighteen-year history, the COH has had three directors: Pamela Dean, now archivist at the Maine Folklife Center; Mary Hebert Price, now owner of a historic-consulting business; and Jennifer Abraham.
From its earliest days, the center’s mission was three-fold: to collect, preserve, and disseminate taped interviews, with a particular focus on the history of LSU. The focus has expanded to include Louisiana politics, civil rights, and women’s history. At last count, the center had some five thousand hours of taped recollections housed at Hill Memorial Library.
From its earliest days, the center’s mission was three-fold: to collect, preserve, and disseminate taped interviews, with a particular focus on the history of LSU.
In addition to conducting many interviews herself, Dean trained people in the process and sent them into the field with Sony tape recorders equipped with ninety-minute cassette tapes.
One of her first interviews was with 1912 graduate Grover Rees. “When I went to LSU in 1908, I had to ride four different trains,” Rees said. “First, from Breaux Bridge to Port Barre. Second, from Port Barre to the main line of the Texas-Pacific, at Melville on the Atchafalaya. Third, I took the main line of the Texas-Pacific as far down as Brusly. On another train, train number four, I went as far as Port Allen. And then I took the ferry boat. So it took me two days, four trains and a ferry boat to get to Baton Rouge. That was the transportation facilities in 1908.”
Price’s particular area of interest was civil rights in Baton Rouge (including the 1953 bus boycott), the subject of her doctoral thesis. As administrator, she also acquired hundreds of hours of tape from the Louisiana Folklore collection at the department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism.
Abraham became director in 2006. From offices in the Agnes Morris House on Raphael Semmes Road, she oversees a staff of two—manuscript processor Erin McMenamin Hess and webmaster/sound engineer Rob Fleming.
One of Abraham’s first tasks was to propel the center’s holdings into the digital age. In 2006, she hired a consultant to help build a lab to digitalize the audiotapes. After finishing the lab, the consultant trained the staff in the use of the digital equipment.
Starting in early 2008, Fleming set to work converting the oldest and most vulnerable tapes to digital format. So far he has converted seven hundred hours of tape, Abraham said.
With such a small staff, the center relies on a graduate student and a half dozen student workers to transcribe and log the interviews. Five experienced contract workers also conduct interviews.
The digital field recorders, small enough to slip into a shirt pocket, are marvels of technology. They’re much easier to transport than the eight-pound Sonys of a few years ago. And of course they are light years from Williams’s cumbersome equipment.
“Wonderful things are available now technologically,” says Abraham. “T. Harry would have been delighted. There’s been an amazing technological revolution.”
That revolution enabled the center to recently launch “What Endures,” a series of podcasts that can be accessed from the center’s Web site.
The first podcast, fittingly enough, features T. Harry himself interviewing former governor Richard Leche (who had served a prison term for misuse of state funds in the Lousiana Scandals) about the day of Huey Long’s assassination in 1935.
Leche tells Williams that he and Huey had spoken by phone, and Huey had told Leche he wanted him to run for governor in 1936. “I said, ‘Oh man, you’re nuts.’ [Huey said] ‘I’m going to talk to you.’ And so he hung up. . . . [A few hours later] as we stopped the car in front of the house I could hear the telephone ring. I picked up the phone and he said ‘That you, Dick? This is Abe. Huey has just been shot.’ That was just a few hours since I had talked to him.”
“T. Harry had this way of getting people to open up to him,” says Abraham. “He just had a built-in charisma, and he was an excellent researcher. People wanted to talk to him.”
While still focused on LSU and Louisiana politics, the center has branched out into many other avenues, including projects on women environmentalists in the 1970s; Vietnam veterans; and Hurricane Betsy’s effect on New Orleans’s Ninth Ward.
Now, especially with the collection becoming available online, each new addition is one voice saved from obscurity. “It’s an opportunity for these voices to live again,” says Abraham.
And then there are the donations, which might be called “found sound.” Like the man who drove up to the center one day to deliver twenty reel-to-reel tapes of interviews with survivors of Hurricane Audrey in 1957. “And Louisiana Public Broadcasting just donated a giant collection of World War Two memoirs on video,” says Abraham.
This year has been particularly meaningful to the center, as it is the centennial of Williams’s birth. “There are still people who don’t accept oral history as true history, says Abraham. “But T. Harry was a renowned scholar already, and he helped legitimize it. Oral history grew exponentially because of him.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.
Details. Details. Details.
The podcast series “What Endures” can be found here.
