Appalachian History Series – The Appalachian Oral History Project: Students, Tapes, and Memory Across Central Appalachia
In college and community archives across Appalachia, there are shelves full of grey tape boxes that once sat on classroom desks and car seats and kitchen tables. Many of them carry simple labels in student handwriting, something like “Hazard, KY – coal camp life” or “Avery Co., NC – highways.” Together they make up one of the most ambitious attempts to catch everyday mountain life on tape in the late twentieth century: the Appalachian Oral History Project.
What began as a small experiment at two eastern Kentucky colleges grew into a four-school consortium that recorded thousands of interviews across three states. Those voices now live in scattered archives and digital collections, and they continue to shape how scholars, teachers, and local communities remember the region.
A four-college experiment in grassroots history
The Appalachian Oral History Project (AOHP) took shape at the turn of the 1970s at Alice Lloyd College in Pippa Passes and at Lees Junior College, now the Lees College Campus of Hazard Community and Technical College. Organizers framed it at first as a research program: students and faculty would conduct tape-recorded interviews to document the history and folklore of the Central Appalachian region, with an eye toward everyday experience rather than elite politics.
Within a few years, the project expanded into a consortium that linked four institutions in three states: Alice Lloyd College and Lees Junior College in Kentucky, Emory & Henry College in Southwest Virginia, and Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Emory & Henry’s Appalachian Center for Civic Life later summarized the effort as a long-running collaboration in which students, faculty, and community members “conducted and recorded personal interviews with thousands of citizens across the region.”
That timing mattered. As John R. Williams and Katherine R. Martin later argued in their classic article “The Appalachian Oral History Project: Then and Now,” the AOHP emerged in the same era as the War on Poverty, the upsurge of student activism, and new interest in “history from the bottom up.” In that climate, recording a coal miner’s memory of the Great Depression or a farmer’s recollection of road building in the highlands counted as serious historical work rather than just local color.
The project soon attracted outside support, including federal humanities funding, and became an educational program as much as a research initiative. Students learned to design interviews, navigate consent forms, and work with elders and neighbors as teachers in their own right. Over time, new interviews stopped being added, but the original tapes remained in campus archives where they awaited the next generation of researchers.
What the interviews actually captured
The surviving tapes are not a single unified collection. Each campus had its own cluster of projects, priorities, and course assignments. Taken together, though, they form a remarkably broad portrait of twentieth-century mountain life.
At Appalachian State University, the reprocessed “Appalachian Oral History Project Records” (AC.111) include nearly 500 interviews conducted mainly by students and faculty with older residents of western North Carolina in the 1970s. Topics run from Civil War stories passed down through families to farm life during the Great Depression, the arrival of hard-surfaced roads and modern highways, and the intertwining of religion, music, and education in small communities. The same campus maintains a separate AOHP Interviews digital collection that holds more than 400 interviews, focused especially on residents of Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Caldwell counties.
In eastern Kentucky, the Alice Lloyd College archives developed what is now called the Appalachian Oral History Collection. The McGaw Library’s description notes that it includes more than two thousand oral history tapes documenting local history and folklore, created as part of the joint undertaking among Alice Lloyd, Lees, Emory & Henry, and Appalachian State. At Lees College, a related body of interviews became known as the Hazard-Lees Appalachian Oral History Project. Today those recordings are accessible through the Kentucky Digital Library and described as interviews that “provide a glimpse into the people and places of Eastern Kentucky,” especially around Hazard and the surrounding counties.
Berea College was not part of the original consortium, but its Hutchins Library launched overlapping initiatives that look very much like the AOHP in scope and method. A January 1973 History 190 course produced the “Berea College 1973 Appalachian Oral History Project Collection,” while a separate “Appalachian Oral History Collection (1973 Fall Term)” brought together twenty-one cassettes of interviews, musical performances, and discussions about institutions such as Pine Mountain Settlement School, the John C. Campbell Folk School, the Christian Appalachian Project, and Civilian Conservation Corps camps in Pike County. These Berea projects are often grouped with or compared to AOHP because they share the same period, region, and emphasis on student-led interviewing.
Across all of these clusters, certain themes repeat. Interviewees talk about subsistence farming and coal mining, the shift from animal power to mechanization, one-room schools and consolidated high schools, conservative and charismatic churches, union organizing and anti-union resistance, midwives and country doctors, and the small ways that roads, electricity, and welfare programs filtered into everyday life. Scholars of language have drawn on AOHP recordings to study Appalachian speech patterns, while social historians have used them to track changing ideas about work, family, and migration.
The union catalog and the National Agricultural Library
As interviews accumulated at the four core campuses, the project leaders faced a practical problem. By the mid-1970s there were hundreds of tapes scattered across several states, and researchers needed a way to know which campus held a particular story.
One answer came in the form of a printed reference work: the Appalachian Oral History Project Union Catalog. Compiled at Alice Lloyd College and published in 1977, the union catalog ran to 164 pages and was later indexed by the U.S. National Agricultural Library (NAL). It annotated interviews and provided a consolidated box list across participating institutions, so a scholar interested in, for example, moonshining in Letcher County or road building in Ashe County could identify relevant tapes and where they were housed.
The NAL’s own “Appalachian Oral History Project Collection” includes several boxes of transcribed interviews along with a copy of the union catalog. In effect, the federal library became an additional steward of the project, preserving both the transcripts and the key to finding them. At Appalachian State, the W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection even maintains the Alice-Lloyd-produced Appalachian Oral History Collection on microfiche as a reference resource, underscoring how widely the material circulated in the era before online access.
For a time, serious work with AOHP often began not with a streaming audio player but with the union catalog, a set of finding aids, and a stack of call slips.
Emory & Henry and the civic memory of Southwest Virginia
Emory & Henry’s involvement in the AOHP pulled the project explicitly into the work of civic memory and community engagement. The college’s Appalachian Center for Civic Life describes the AOHP as a consortium project that began in 1973, in which students, faculty, and community members recorded interviews with “thousands of citizens across the region.”
At Emory & Henry, that work has now been folded into a broader digital humanities program. The Appalachian Center’s digital archives house account books and daybooks from the nineteenth century alongside all of Emory & Henry’s AOHP recordings, transcripts, and photographs. Those oral histories have been fully digitized and are searchable online, where they are used in courses across the curriculum and by community members who want to hear elders recount the history of Southwest Virginia in their own words.
This emphasis on student learning and public access completes a loop that began in the early 1970s. What started as a way to teach undergraduates how to do oral history has become a long-running archive that now teaches new cohorts of students and neighbors about their own place.
Digitizing Alice Lloyd, Lees, and the eastern Kentucky tapes
In eastern Kentucky, the AOHP legacy runs through both Alice Lloyd College’s McGaw Library and the Lees College Campus of Hazard Community and Technical College. Alice Lloyd’s description of its Appalachian Oral History Collection stresses that the tapes were created as part of a joint undertaking with Emory & Henry, Appalachian State, and Lees, and that they document the history and folklore of the Central Appalachian region.
At Lees, the Appalachian Oral History Collection at HCTC has taken on the work of preserving and sharing the Hazard-Lees portion of the project. Their history notes that the project began as a cooperative effort between Alice Lloyd and Lees in 1970, expanded to the four-school consortium, and eventually shifted from generating new interviews to preserving the existing ones. The collection consists of roughly 1,300 tapes which are in the process of being digitized for long-term access. Through the Kentucky Digital Library, many of these interviews are already online as the Hazard-Lees Appalachian Oral History Project, where researchers can stream recordings that capture eastern Kentucky speech, storytelling, and local memory in the 1970s.
Regional advocates have taken notice. A 2019 piece in the Mountain Association’s “Appalachia’s New Day” series singled out Alice Lloyd College’s Appalachian Oral History Project as a four-school, three-state effort to record oral histories and folklore from Central Appalachia, placing it alongside Berea College, Pine Mountain Settlement School, and Appalshop as key anchors for historical memory in Kentucky’s mountains.
Berea College and closely related projects
Berea College’s Hutchins Library never formally joined the AOHP consortium, yet several of its oral history projects from the early 1970s look very much like sister initiatives. The “Berea College 1973 Appalachian Oral History Project Collection,” cataloged as RG 14-14.03, grew out of a January short-term history course in which students recorded interviews on topics ranging from moonshining and rural religion to local politics. A related “Appalachian Oral History Collection (1973 Fall Term)” (BCA 0059 SAA 059) brought together interviews, musical performances, and commentary on institutions like Pine Mountain Settlement School, the John C. Campbell Folk School, and the Christian Appalachian Project.
Later Berea projects, including the Appalachian Museum Oral History Collection and the Appalachian Volunteers oral histories, continued this work of documenting crafts, occupations, and expressive culture across the wider region. In practice, researchers often move back and forth between AOHP materials and these Berea collections, since they share narrators, themes, and a commitment to recording the voices of ordinary Appalachian people.
From tapes to books and scholarship
The AOHP was not only a source for archivists. It also fed directly into published work. One of the most visible examples is Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg’s Our Appalachia: An Oral History of Growing Up in the 1900s. The editors built the book explicitly from hundreds of AOHP interviews, weaving them into a “verbal tapestry” of childhood and youth in the mountain South during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. For many readers, this book served as a first introduction to the voices that students had recorded on portable tape machines only a few years earlier.
Williams and Martin’s 1984 Provenance article took a different approach. Instead of reprinting interview excerpts, they stepped back to analyze the project itself, asking what it meant to have so many student-generated interviews scattered across multiple campuses and how archivists might make them usable. Their work helped frame AOHP as not just a teaching experiment or a set of local collections, but as a regional documentary project in its own right.
Since then, linguists have used subsets of AOHP interviews to study Appalachian English, including detailed analyses of negation and auxiliary contraction based on Alice Lloyd’s tapes from the 1970s. Historians and folklorists have drawn on the recordings to track shifting attitudes toward coal mining, welfare, religion, and migration. Community groups and museums have turned to AOHP material for exhibits, walking tours, and family history workshops.
Finding and using AOHP today
For contemporary researchers, the practical question is not whether AOHP material exists, but how to navigate it. Because the project was decentralized, there is no single master index or portal. Instead, each campus offers its own doorway.
For eastern Kentucky topics, Alice Lloyd College’s Appalachian Oral History Collection and the Hazard-Lees Appalachian Oral History Project in the Kentucky Digital Library are natural starting points. Alice Lloyd’s special collections description underscores that more than two thousand tapes document local history and folklore, while the Hazard-Lees collection on the KDL site allows users to search and stream individual interviews.
For western North Carolina, Appalachian State’s Special Collections Research Center houses both the AC.111 AOHP Records and the separate AOHP Interviews digital collection. The AC.111 finding aid emphasizes the range of subjects, from Civil War recollections to Great Depression farm life and highway construction, and points to accompanying photographs and visual materials.
For Southwest Virginia, Emory & Henry’s Appalachian Center for Civic Life Digital Archives provide streaming access to the college’s AOHP recordings within a larger civic memory project that includes account books, daybooks, and church records. For those interested in Berea’s parallel efforts, Hutchins Library’s online finding aids for the 1973 Appalachian Oral History Project collections lay out interview topics and offer access to digitized audio.
Across the board, the old union catalog and its listing in the National Agricultural Library remain helpful for cross-referencing interviews by topic and location, especially when planning archival trips or trying to match a citation in older scholarship to a current call number. ArchiveGrid’s aggregated entry on the Appalachian Oral History Project can also serve as a quick check on which repositories currently report AOHP holdings and how they describe them.
The Digital Library of Appalachia, though not an AOHP-specific site, is another useful tool. It brings together digitized materials from multiple Appalachian institutions, and various guides note that AOHP interviews, especially those from Appalachian State, are discoverable through or alongside DLA, where they sit next to photographs, field recordings, and other regional materials.
Why the Appalachian Oral History Project still matters
Taken as a whole, the Appalachian Oral History Project reminds us that large-scale documentation of everyday life does not always come from national agencies or professional historians. In the case of AOHP, it came from small colleges in coalfields and hill country, from students armed with tape recorders, and from older neighbors willing to sit down and talk through the story of their lives.
Those conversations were shaped by their moment. The interviewers were working in the shadow of strip mines and interstate highways, in the wake of the War on Poverty and Appalachian Volunteers, and amid debates about how to represent the region in film, fiction, and policy. The narrators, in turn, reached backward to the Civil War and the Great Depression and forward to a future in which their grandchildren might leave the mountains or stay and try to change them.
Today, researchers encounter AOHP interviews in many forms: as a digitized cassette in the Hazard-Lees project, as a transcript in the National Agricultural Library, as a chapter in Our Appalachia, or as a clip embedded in a classroom lecture. The project’s original organizers could not have planned for all of those uses. What they did plan for was to capture voices that might otherwise have gone unrecorded.
For anyone interested in the history of Central Appalachia, the AOHP and its related collections are less a single archive than a network of listening posts. Each tape is a place where a particular mountain voice met a microphone at a particular moment. Taken together, they offer not a single story of Appalachia, but thousands of overlapping ones, waiting in campus libraries and digital repositories for the next listener to press play.
Sources & Further Reading
Alice Lloyd College. “Appalachian Oral History Collection.” Appalachian Special Collections, McGaw Library and Learning Center, Alice Lloyd College, Pippa Passes, KY. Collection description. https://lfarchives.weebly.com/appalachian-oral-history-collection.html Alice Lloyd College+1
“Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965–1989.” W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Appalachian State University. Digital oral history collection. http://omeka.library.appstate.edu/collections/show/7 Southern Spaces
“Appalachian Oral History Project.” Special Collections Research Center, Appalachian State University. News post describing the reprocessed Appalachian Oral History Project Records (AC.111). https://collections.library.appstate.edu/news/appalachian-oral-history-project Home
“Oral History Program.” Special Collections Research Center, Appalachian State University. Overview of the App State oral history program and its projects, including the Appalachian Oral History Project. https://collections.library.appstate.edu/collections/oral-history-program Home+1
“Appalachian Oral History Project records.” ArchiveGrid collection description, Appalachian State University, Belk Library. Summary of the combined effort of Appalachian State University, Alice Lloyd College, Emory & Henry College, and Lees Junior College to document Central Appalachian history and folklore. https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/collection/data/513_sappstatespeccolllyrasistechnologyorgrepositories2resources195 OCLC
Appalachian Oral History Project Collection, 1970–1977. MS0316, National Agricultural Library Special Collections, Beltsville, MD. Finding aid. https://archivesspace.nal.usda.gov/repositories/4/resources/782 National Agricultural Library+1
Appalachian Oral History Project. Appalachian Oral History Project: Union Catalog. Beltsville, MD: National Agricultural Library, 1977. Google Books entry. https://books.google.com/books?id=SWgsAAAAYAAJ Google Books+1
Appalachian Center for Civic Life. “Appalachian Oral History Project.” Appalachian Center for Civic Life Digital Archives, Emory & Henry College. Overview of the Emory & Henry component of the project and access to digitized recordings, transcripts, and photographs. https://civicmemory.org/collections/show/1 Emory & Henry University+1
Emory & Henry University. “Appalachian Oral History Project.” E&H Library project summary describing the four school consortium, NEH funding, and the project’s long term role in student learning and community engagement. https://www.emoryhenry.edu/live/profiles/1126-appalachian-oral-history-project Emory & Henry University
Hazard Community and Technical College. “Appalachian Oral History Project Finding Aid.” LibGuides, Hazard Community and Technical College Libraries. Subject and name index for the Lees College interviews. https://hazard.kctcs.libguides.com/appalachianoralhistoryfindingaid KCTCS LibGuides
Hazard Community and Technical College. “Hazard-Lees Appalachian Oral History Project.” Kentucky Digital Library. Digital collection of recorded interviews documenting the people and places of Eastern Kentucky. https://kdl.kyvl.org/digital/collection/haz-lees-aohp KDL
Berea College. “Oral History — Appalachian Region.” Hutchins Library Special Collections and Archives. Subject page listing multiple Appalachian oral history collections, including the Berea College 1973 Appalachian Oral History Project Collection (January Short Term, RG 14-14.03) and the Appalachian Oral History Collection (1973 Fall Term, BCA 0059 SAA 059). https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/subjects/783 Berea College Archives+1
Digital Library of Appalachia. “Digital Library of Appalachia.” Appalachian College Association. Aggregated portal to digitized archival and historical materials from Appalachian institutions. https://acaweb.org/digital-library acaweb.org+1
“Kentucky Digital Library.” Kentucky Virtual Library. Statewide portal to digital collections, including the Hazard-Lees Appalachian Oral History Project and related oral history sets. https://kdl.kyvl.org/ KDL
Kentucky Oral History Commission. “Grant Recipients.” Kentucky Historical Society. Listing of projects supported by KOHC grants, including the Appalachian Oral History Project at Berea College and Hazard/Lees College. https://history.ky.gov/participate/kentucky-oral-history-commission/grant-recipients Kentucky History
Appalachian State University. “App State Oral History Program Preserves the Past and Present Through Storytelling.” Appalachian Today, November 18, 2024. Contextual article that highlights the Appalachian Oral History Project interviews within the broader App State oral history program and notes progress in digitizing audio and transcripts. https://today.appstate.edu/2024/11/18/oral-history-project Appalachian Today
Mountain Association. “Appalachia’s New Day: Preserving Local Histories in Eastern Kentucky.” August 7, 2019. Public facing story that profiles Eastern Kentucky archives and mentions Alice Lloyd College’s Appalachian Oral History Project as a regional effort to preserve local memories. https://mtassociation.org/communities/preserving-histories/ Mountain Association
Williams, John R., and Katherine R. Martin. “The Appalachian Oral History Project: Then and Now.” Provenance: The Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists 2, no. 1 (1984). https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/provenance/vol2/iss1/5/ KSU Digital Commons+1
Shackelford, Laurel, and Bill Weinberg, eds. Our Appalachia: An Oral History of Growing Up in the 1900s. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_appalachian_studies/19/ UKnowledge
Sikes, Scott. “Meaning, Encounter, and Reclamation: Relistening to the Appalachian Oral History Project.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 27, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 106–115. https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jas/article/27/1/106/284077/Meaning-Encounter-and-Reclamation-Relistening-to Scholarly Publishing Collective+1
Sikes, Scott. “Meaning and Memory: Reconsidering the Appalachian Oral History Project.” International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion 5, no. 2 (2021): 84–98. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/article/view/34830 Journal Production Services+1
Sikes, Scott. “Digitizing the Appalachian Oral History Project: Engaging Students through Project Based Learning in the Archive.” Paper presented at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference, 2019. https://mds.marshall.edu/asa_conference/2019/session6/13/ Marshall Digital Scholar+1
Appalachian State University. “Hunting in Appalachia: A Guide to Resources in the W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection.” Research aid that cites the Appalachian Oral History Project Union Catalog as a key tool for locating interviews. https://collections.library.appstate.edu/research-aids/hunting-appalachia Home+1
Author Note: Projects like the Appalachian Oral History Project are the backbone of the sources I rely on at AppalachianHistorian.org. I hope this overview helps you find, listen to, and use these recordings in your own research, teaching, or family history work.