To listen
Tennessee Valley StoryCorps, featuring conversations recorded recently in Chattanooga, will begin airing Tuesday, June 4, on WUTC-FM 88.1. The four-minute segments will run Tuesdays during “Morning Edition,” 6-9 a.m., “Scenic Roots,” 3-4 p.m., and “All Things Considered,” 4-7 p.m. Find out more at wutc.org.
In late March, friends and former Times Free Press colleagues Shawn Ryan and Barry Courter sat across from each other in a darkened recording studio inside an Airstream travel trailer repurposed as the StoryCorps Mobile Booth parked at Miller Park. For about an hour they talked about their shared experiences as music reporters, editors, reviewers for different Southern newspapers as well as simply being music fans.
StoryCorps is the personal history project that airs on National Public Radio, heard here on WUTC-FM 88.1. For the project, two people spend about an hour together asking questions and sharing stories. The Mobile Tour launched back in 2005 and has recorded more than 500,000 stories since.
The stories recorded in Chattanooga, as well as elsewhere around the country, are recorded and, if both parties agree, the recordings are then stored in the StoryCorps archive at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. You can learn more and hear many of the stories at storycorps.org.
Each tells the story of the individual or individuals, but collectively they tell the story of a nation. They include sons and daughters or grandchildren digging for family history, individuals discussing such deeply personal things such as learning they have an incurable disease, homosexuality, being raped, unrequited love. Anything and everything, really.