StoryCorps in Birmingham
Ryan Dorgan
StoryCorps, a renowned nonprofit organization celebrating the stories of everyday Americans, will record interviews in Birmingham from February 12th to March 13th as part of its cross-country MobileBooth tour. Having collected more than 65,000 interviews from Americans in all 50 states, StoryCorps has gathered one of the largest single collection of human voices ever recorded.
- StoryCorps’ MobileBooth—an Airstream trailer outfitted with a recording studio—will be parked at Railroad Park.
- Reservations will be available at 10 a.m. on January 29th and can be made by calling StoryCorps’ 24-hour toll-free reservation line at 1-800-850-4406 or visiting storycorps.org.
- Additional appointments will be available on February 13th.
Recording a StoryCorps interview couldn’t be easier: You invite a loved one, or anyone else you chose, to one of the StoryCorps recording sites. There you’re met by a trained facilitator who greets you and explains the interview process. You’re then brought into a quiet recording room and seated across from your interview partner, each of you in front of a microphone. The facilitator hits “record,” and you share a 40-minute conversation. At the end of the session, you walk away with a copy of the interview, and a digital file goes to the Library of Congress, where it will be preserved for generations to come. Someday your great-great-great-grandchildren will be able to meet your grandfather, your mother, your best friend, or whomever it is you chose to honor with a StoryCorps interview.
Founded in 2003 by award-winning documentary producer and MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay, StoryCorps has traveled to every corner of the country to record interviews in the organization’s effort to create a world where we listen closely to each other and recognize the beauty, grace and poetry in the lives and stories we find all around us.
In Birmingham, StoryCorps will partner with WBHM, Birmingham’s NPR station. WBHM will air a selection of the local interviews recorded in the StoryCorps MobileBooth and create special programs around the project. StoryCorps may also share excerpts of these stories with the world through the project’s popular weekly NPR broadcasts, animated shorts, digital platforms, and best-selling books.
StoryCorps shares edited excerpts of the stories we record through its weekly podcast, NPR broadcasts, animated shorts, digital platforms, and best-selling books. These powerful stories illustrate our shared humanity and show how much more we share in common than divides us. StoryCorps has launched a series of national recording initiatives including:
- The Justice Project, an effort to preserve and amplify the voices of people affected by incarceration, their families and communities;
- The September 11th Initiative, helping families memorialize the stories of lives lost on September 11, 2001, in partnership with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center;
- The Griot Initiative, now the largest collection of African American voices ever gathered, in collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture;
- Historias, the largest collection of Latino stories ever gathered;
- StoryCorps OutLoud, which documents the powerful, varied experiences of LGBTQ people across America, with a focus on lives lived before Stonewall; and
- The Military Voices Initiative, honoring the stories of post-9/11 service members, veterans and their families.
