For nearly 40 years, more than 600 Radford University students have collected oral histories and folklore material from family members and residents from around Southwest Virginia in a project for an Appalachian folklore class.
When Grace Toney Edwards, then a member of the university’s English and Appalachian studies faculty, designed the field-collecting project in 1981, she emphasized that those projects would be preserved for future scholars and researchers in hopes that her students would take the assignment more seriously.
“And did they ever,” Edwards said. “Many of them put in multiple hours of work making contacts, interviewing, transcribing, analyzing, and recording their findings, many times to the tune of 100-plus pages.”
Edwards kept all of the projects in boxes in her office and then in the Appalachian Regional Studies Center in the mid-1990s. That’s when the project began to take on the look of an archive, said Edwards, now a professor emeritus who retired in 2010.
In 1993 instructor Ricky Cox ’86, M.A. ’90, began teaching an undergraduate course (English 446), and Edwards taught the graduate class (English 548/648) created that same year.
“I think I can safely speak for both of us when I say that we have experienced many personal rewards ourselves just by having the privilege of reading about the lives and behavior of multiple Appalachian people that we would otherwise never have known,” Edwards said.
Keeping the promise to the students, those projects remain intact, and many have found a new home online, making them accessible to anyone at any time.
“You no longer need to make a trip to Radford to view most of those projects,” said Cox.
McConnell Library Archives Supervisor and Appalachian Music Specialist Bud Bennett took on the task in the summer of 2020 of placing the projects online, and currently more than 430 of those projects are available and searchable on the library’s website.The projects are in the form of text and audio, many with photographs or slides that can be filtered by entering the name of a collector, an informant, a town or county, or a general topic, such as canning, blacksmithing, ghosts ,or folk medicine. A simple click on the magnifying glass allows a person to search the entire collection.
Cox and Edwards spoke recently about the topic in a recorded interview for the “With Good Reason” public radio program. The interview will air through April 29 on more than 60 radio stations across the United States. The show is also available as a podcast at withgoodreason.org.
The “With Good Reason” radio program is produced by Virginia Humanities for the Virginia Higher Education Broadcasting Consortium, which comprises all of Virginia’s public colleges and universities.
The award-winning program is heard by an estimated 100,000 people each week on public radio stations in 33 states. Thousands more download the episodes via iTunes.
Chad Osborne
Radford University
