ABSTRACT
We have all been enchanted by the stories of people’s lives. As children welistened to the stories of our parents and grandparents. As we look back and remember, we wish we’d had a recorder running. As we grew, teachers and mentors enriched our lives. In Hollywood and in today’s newscasts, audiences are enthralled with every detail of celebrity lives. Commercial biographies and autobiographies of a celebrity’s life fly off the shelves-some having historical value, others having little. The oral history tradition is as old as civilization itself. Before the written and the mediated word-we had the spoken word. Family histories, genealogy, myth, folklore, stories of moral perpetuity, even business operations and relationship structures were memorized and passed from generation to generation-from mind to mind.
