He was accused of listening too much to the ‘wrong people’, of being ‘too deferential’, not judgmental enough. Sometimes those he interviewed afterwards said that he was like ‘a ferret’, who pried too deeply into their lives, ‘looking for the facts that he wanted’. But Tony Parker, who died in 1996, gave a voice to those who were not usually heard or cared about. He made their lives sound special, individually important. In books such as Life After Life, The People of Providence, Lighthouse and Red Hill he opened up the lives of murderers, working people on a south-east London estate, lighthouse-keepers and miners, telling their stories in their own words. On Archive on 4 on Saturday, that other ‘great listener’ Alan Dein looked back on Parker’s work to find out how he did it. How did he get thieves to let slip their wallet-lifting methods? Why did murderers tell him about their awful past lives in such a frank but totally unsentimental way? What made repeat offenders explain to him, without pity, how shutting people up in institutions for even just a month or two will change them, ‘and not for the better’?
Little archive footage now remains of Parker’s own voice, but on Saturday we heard him explaining his technique. ‘I always try and sit at a slightly lower level than the person I’m interviewing,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the sensation of talking down.’
Contrary to what you might think, he actually made sure his tape recorder was very ‘conspicuous’ and would spend the first few minutes fumbling about with it, as if he were a complete idiot and useless with the technology. He always made sure to point out the ‘stop’ button, and that it could be pressed at any time. At the end of the session he would say, ‘Ask me anything you want to know,’ as if to make sure there was a perceived (if not actual) equality between interviewer and interviewee.
Perhaps the key to his success in eliciting the essential truths about the lives of the people he was so keen to give voice to was his ‘concern’, in the Quaker sense, not his interest, his reaction, his curiosity. Another aspect of his unusual ability to efface himself, to take out his own ego from the exchange, was his realisation, ‘If I don’t have anything important to say, I don’t say anything.’
Parker always maintained that he didn’t ‘tell’ these stories, they told themselves, from the tapes he made, as many as 200 to 300 cassettes per book. But of course he had to edit all this material down, and although all the words were verbatim, not made up, in the very editing he shaped the stories, distilled their truth.
On Radio 2 on Monday night, Roseanne Cash (daughter of Johnny Cash) took us back to the summer of 1967 and the sound of that extraordinary song, ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ (which knocked the Beatles off the charts). If you’re too young to know it, look it up on YouTube. It’s spine-chilling — and a brilliant example of how to tell a story in just 4 minutes 25 seconds.
We never do discover why Billie Joe MacAllister threw himself off the Tallahatchie Bridge, or what the narrator of the song, a young girl living on a farm in the sultry Mississippi Delta, threw off the bridge just before. (Don’t bother with the 1976 film that made a hash of providing a back story to the song.) It doesn’t really matter. It’s the details (the black-eyed peas and apple pie for dinner, the family’s conversation) that create the atmosphere — that, and the extraordinary husky, direct voice of the song’s creator Bobbie Gentry.
She was a singer-songwriter out of the Delta country, who grew up poor and made a fortune through her music. Then she disappeared, her whereabouts now unknown, as mysterious as the edgy string-sound of her most famous song. Why? Cash set out to find out.
She was probably too beautiful (long dark hair, even longer legs), says Cash, written off as ‘a pop creature’ with no depth. Bob Dylan hated what he thought was the cheap, penny-dreadful style of ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ and wrote his own pastiche, ‘The Clothes Line Saga’. Her songs sound funky, even a bit poppy, but then the words hit you. Gentry makes sure you hear every word as she tells the story of ‘Fancy’, dressed up and sent off into prostitution by her mother.
‘And I shivered as I watched a roach crawl across the toe of my high-heeled shoe,’ she sings, living out the song so that Fancy becomes real, in much the same way as Tony Parker wrote up the stories of the people he interviewed. Not explaining, not finishing, not rounding off the story, just telling.
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