Interview
I [interviewer James Cavanaugh] interviewed Williams for two and a half hours at his home in Nashville on October 5, 1978. Williams is a short man who, before a series of health problems, was once very heavy set. His accent and speech patterns leave no doubt about his southern roots.
Williams was selected as an interviewee for the TWUA Oral History Project because of his long service on the Executive Council and in the South. Unfortunately, age has caught up with his health and his memory, and the interview is of limited usefulness. Williams was particularly weak on the tough questions about southern organizing, the decline of TWUA, and other topics which require some interpretive thought. Interspersed throughout the interview, however, are some quotable quotes and a few nuggets of opinion, attitude, and detail.
Abstract
The tapes for this interview have two tracks: a voice track containing the discussion and a time track containing time announcements at intervals of approximately five seconds. The abstract lists, in order of discussion, the topics covered on each tape, and indicates the time-marking at which point the beginning of the particular discussion appears.
Thus, the researcher by using a tape recorder's fast-forward button may find expeditiously and listen to discrete segments without listening to all of the taped discussion. For instance, the user who wishes to listen to the topic on “Hired by TWOC” should locate the place on the second track of side one, tape one, where the voice announces the 10:25 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “Ten minutes, twenty-five seconds”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “Hired by TWOC” continues until approximately 13:15 at which point discussion of the next topic (“The Textile Industry in Tennessee and Alabama”) begins.
Notice that in most cases sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example, the sentences underneath “Hired by TWOC” give further details on what appears on the tape between 10:25 and 13:15.
The abstract is designed to provide only a brief outline of the content of the tapes and cannot serve as a substitute for listening to them. However, the abstract when used with the index will help the researcher easily locate distinct topics and discussions among the many minutes of commentary.
Index
There is a master index for most of the TWUA Oral History Project interviews in the collection-level finding aid.
