Keeneland Library, in partnership with the University of Kentucky Libraries’ Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History and Thoroughbred Daily News (TDN), has undertaken an ambitious project to preserve and share the voices that have shaped the Thoroughbred industry in the Bluegrass.
The Life’s Work Oral History Project, a collection of 15 oral history video interviews featuring prominent figures in the Thoroughbred industry, was conducted this summer and will be released monthly over the next year. Through the lens of historical accounts, each interview shares a personal perspective on the life experiences of a different industry leader, with a healthy dose of cultural context and, of course, their recollections of the exceptional equines that touched their lives.
In Keeneland’s Life’s Work oral history interview, Darby Dan Farm owner John Phillips and other well-known horsemen share family stories about pivotal figures in the Thoroughbred industry, including Phillips’ grandfather, Darby Dan’s founder John W. Galbreath, shown third from left.
While Keeneland Library has undertaken oral history projects related to the Thoroughbred industry in the past, the Life’s Work program takes the effort a few steps beyond recording people’s personal accounts, said Becky Ryder, director of the Keeneland Library.
“It is a systematic, well-conceived program to capture, provide context, provide access and preserve for the long term the stories that these people have to tell,” Ryder said. “We are ensuring that everything that we are doing conforms to the highest standards for historic preservation.”
The first interviews to be released feature Claiborne Farm’s Seth Hancock, John Phillips of Darby Dan Farm, and Keeneland Trustee Emeritus James E. “Ted” Bassett III.
The need to capture these stories has long been a goal within the industry, Ryder said, but the quality of the project wouldn’t have been possible without the combined skillsets, enhanced technology and collaborative energy that each partnering organization brought to the table. The interviews were conducted by TDN’s equine journalist Chris McGrath and filmed by Keeneland Broadcast Services over two weeks in August.
The project also includes edited videos and a podcast series produced by the Patty Wolfe Media Group. The unedited oral history interviews will also be available on The Nunn Center’s state-of-the-art oral history archive, which can be found online at www.kentuckyoralhistory.org. Each Life’s Work interview will be indexed for easier reference and accessible to a global audience of researchers and interested listeners thanks to the Nunn Center’s own OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) technology, which is used by institutions in more than 60 countries. The searchable catalog, called SPOKEdb, currently holds roughly 13,500 interviews, said Doug Boyd, Ph.D., the Nunn Center’s director.
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Claiborne Farm’s Seth Hancock, shown at far right in photo on the left, recounts his recollections of his father, Arthur B. “Bull” Hancock Jr., in Life’s Work’s first installment.
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John Phillips, shown in photo on the right, shares his experience in leading Darby Dan Farm into the modern age in the second installment.
Oral histories are particularly well-suited to the Thoroughbred industry in Kentucky, Boyd said, because of the many multigenerational family connections that weave through its history, as well as the highly specialized industry knowledge often acquired and transferred through experience.
“That’s really one of the most beautiful things about the [Kentucky equine] industry, especially as we are globalizing so much more,” Boyd said. “It still has those family components to it, and it still has some of those more traditional methods of passing along knowledge, although that is starting to change.”
Kentucky has established an international reputation as a model for oral history collection and preservation, Boyd said, and new technology is making the state’s oral history resources more useful and accessible than ever before.
“We are really starting to harness the power of digital technologies,” Boyd said. “The most gratifying thing is the use that people are getting out of our collection because of it.”
The Nunn Center has seen an increase in citations of the work cataloged on the OHMS system in recent years, as well as an increase in use of the material by journalists and documentary filmmakers, Boyd said. The Life’s Work series itself has attracted its own early attention. When Seth Hancock’s interview went online, it became the most accessed oral history on the system for that month, Boyd said.
“If you had someone write their story, I don’t think you would get that sense of the passion. That only comes through the face-to-face retelling of it. I think that’s the value of recording stories.” —Becky Ryder, director of the Keeneland Library
The project also coincides with this year’s 80th anniversary of the Keeneland library, which was started in 1939. The library’s collection has grown from an initial 2,300-volume collection donated by Keeneland trustee and director William Arnold Hanger into one of the world’s largest repositories of information related to the Thoroughbred, Ryder said. While she is pleased to see the Life’s Work program fulfilling the Keeneland Library’s mission of preserving and sharing the industry’s best traditions, she said her favorite aspect has been the almost magical storytelling moments that arise when the subjects talk about the iconic racehorses that changed their lives.
“It’s like they enter into a rhapsody. … It moves from being strictly linear and historical into something that is larger than life. I think horses do that to you,” Ryder said. “If you had someone write their story, I don’t think you would get that sense of the passion. That only comes through the face-to-face retelling of it. I think that’s the value of recording stories.”