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Movers & Thinkers: When Lies About The Past Are As Interesting As The Truth

WPLN | By Emily Siner
Published May 11, 2016 at 3:48 AM CDT
Bradley Hanson, left, speaks to Movers & Thinkers host Emily Siner about his documentary work.
Tony Gonzalez / WPLN
Bradley Hanson, left, speaks to Movers & Thinkers host Emily Siner about his documentary work.

Hear a snippet of our interview with Bradley Hanson, from our Movers & Thinkers podcast.

History is often passed down through stories: People document their memories, and those become our guide to the past.

But Bradley Hanson, director of folk life at the Tennessee Arts Commission, has discovered that sometimes this kind of documentation is flawed — because people don't always tell the truth. He talked to WPLN's Emily Siner in our live series, Movers & Thinkers, about his work collecting oral histories from musicians in rural Tennessee, and how his perspective has changed over time.

This audio is an excerpt from the latest episode of our Movers & Thinkers podcast. Hear more of the conversation with Bradley and two other people working to preserve history by downloading our podcast on our website, on iTunes, or on Google Play.

Copyright 2016 WPLN News
Emily Siner
Emily Siner is an enterprise reporter at WPLN. She has worked at the Los Angeles Times and NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., and her written work was recently published in Slices Of Life, an anthology of literary feature writing. Born and raised in the Chicago area, she is a graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
See stories by Emily Siner