Bullwhip Days transcribes a lot of the material these recordings were drawn from. It's good they've taken steps to preserve the recorded interviews, and just as good that they've made accessing some of them easy.

By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 16, 2004; Page C01

Deep, resonant like coming thunder is the voice of Bob Ledbetter as he remembers his life as a slave -- singing to pass the time, learning to read and write, joining the church and getting married.

"Well, how have you got along so well in life?" the interviewer asks Ledbetter in a 1940 conversation in Louisiana. "What's been your principles?"

In his rumbling tone, Ledbetter replies: "I know what's right and I tried my best to do what's right in everything I do."

Beginning today people the world over will be able to listen to interviews with Ledbetter and other former slaves through the online presentation "Voices From the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories" on the Library of Congress's American Memory Web site (www.memory.loc.gov).

One of the most amazing encounters is with Wallace Quarterman, who was interviewed in the mid-1930s. At age 87, he is sometimes difficult to understand when he speaks. He says at one point that he remembers being told that the Yankees were coming and he should run down to the field and let all the slaves go free.

But he is eerily clear when he sings "Jesus Is a Rock in a Weary Land."

He and others, in intricate harmony, sing: "My God is the rock in the weary land. Shelter in the time of storm."

The words are comforting when you read them; chilling when you hear them.

Nearly two dozen people are interviewed. Many of the recordings -- most cut on scratchy 78 rpm discs -- have not been released before.

Most of the reminiscences come from elderly men. Billy McCrea, questioned when he was 89, remembers seeing a group from the North set up a Freedmen's Bureau in a southern town.

Another former slave tells an interviewer: "I got my name from President Jeff Davis. He was president of the Southern Confederacy. He owned my grandfather and my father."

The recordings are important because we can hear the oppression. Michael Taft, head of the library's archive of folk culture, says, "These are the only voices we have from a defining era in American history."

He adds: "These are the stories of people's lives who grew out of slavery."

Reams of written documents regarding slavery, mostly from field historians of the Works Progress Administration, are kept in the library's American Folklife Center and are available on the Web at the American Memory site, Taft says. But those interviewers used dictation and could not always be faithful to what was being said.

The newly released digital recordings are raw and fresh, straight from wellspring. The quality is sometimes poor, and here and there words are swallowed or unintelligible. There are transcripts on the site for every recording. The beauty, Taft says, is that the recordings "are the only way you hear how they expressed themselves."

It is an eerie feeling as you sit in the gray glow of your computer and hear Charlie Smith, reported to be well over 100 years old when he was interviewed, tell of other slaves wanting to throw him off a ship as he sailed from Africa to America. "I was a child, a boy," he says.

His tone is rhythmic, slow. He talks on and on and his voice is crackling, yet resolute, like a rusted gate hinge.

He was tricked onto the slave ship, he tells the interviewer, by promises of pancakes.

At one point during the crossing, he says matter-of-factly, folks were yelling: " 'Throw him overboard!' I was in cuffs. 'Throw him overboard, let the damn whale swallow him like he done Jonah.' "

Smith was interviewed in Florida by historian Elmer Sparks. The other 15 interviewers include notable writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and folklorists such as John and Alan Lomax.

John Lomax, you learn from listening, could be an abrasive interrogator. At one point he snaps at Ledbetter, "Louder. Sing it louder." Ledbetter, with a meek, dulcet air, complies.

"No soap, no starch," Ledbetter trills with a haunting wistfulness. "Nobody, nobody to wash my clothes. Nobody to wash my clothes."

He tells Lomax, "I hate to sing to anybody. My voice, it, it broke."

The site is handsome, as is nearly every Web presentation the library creates. It takes a while to understand the site's navigation, but the investment of time and techno-patience is worth it.

Nearly seven hours of material is available. The recordings were made between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states.

Washingtonian Roscoe E. Lewis, working with the WPA and the Federal Writers' Project, made three recordings of former slaves for the state of Virginia. He and a group of 16 African American chroniclers also put to paper hundreds of oral histories and, in 1940, published "The Negro in Virginia."

Nine of the newly available recordings were produced by the American Dialect Society. The rest come from various sources. The site features 28 songs sung by former slaves.

More than 2,000 additional interviews, compiled by the Federal Writers' Project, are also in the library's collection and available online through the American Memory Web site.

But if you want to hear real people speaking in real voices, you can use your ears and your computer's media player.

The introduction to the library's presentation, on the site's home page, reminds listeners that most of the recorded interviews took place long after the subjects had been in slavery.

Slavery is the recurring theme, but the men and women also discuss their lives after bondage and the changing society around them.

Interviewer John Henry Faulk, a renowned storyteller from Austin, caught up with Laura Smalley in Hempstead, Tex., in 1941. She remembered eating with other slave children from a long, wooden trough-like tray.

Smalley's voice is like a fast-moving train, sometimes sounding like two voices melded into one -- an older woman and a younger girl.

She refers to herself as "a great big girl" and "a big old girl" at times in the interview.

At one point Smalley is asked what her family did after the Emancipation Proclamation. "Mama and them didn't know where to go, you see, after freedom broke," Smalley says. "Just turned, just like you turn something out, you know. Didn't know where to go. That's just where they stayed."