Has another corner of the planet – this small and this removed – produced two great volumes of oral history within the space of seven years? Linsey Lee, of the Oral History Center at the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, has collected and edited the histories of at least 450 Islanders in the past quarter-century. More Vineyard Voices (Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, 2005, 342 pages, $59.95 hardcover, $39.95 soft cover) presents a second set of 77 interviews, following the 75 that appeared in the original Vineyard Voices in 1998.
More Vineyard Voices is more elegiac than the first book; the subjects are even more aware of how the character of the Island is changing with the passing of their own families and friends. But there are merry tales here as well. Seamond Ponsart Roberts of Tisbury talks of taking a wind-up record player to the top of the West Chop Lighthouse and blasting the forbidden Elvis Presley to the summer winds. The late Carrie Osborn Fisher, a church organist in Edgartown, remembers being pressed into steering the last freight vessel under sail while her master, Zeb Tilton, went below to eat his supper. “I just thought my family had sailed plenty,” she said. “I could do it. And I just love to think of that.”
With More Vineyard Voices, Lee gives the Island another funny, melancholy, detailed record of its history. More Vineyard Voices offers flavors of an Island where the quality of life was rooted in the very nature of its inhabitants. The importance of Linsey Lee’s work cannot be measured.