Oral history and research on the history of popular music

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of the oral history research method for the exploration of the history of popular music in Poland, especially in the communist era. Existing history research on the subject, however important and extremely inspiring, is based mostly on the available archival resources, whilst personal accounts of participants are used only as a source for popular-science or socio-political commentary publications. Analysis of the Polish propaganda festival phenomenon such as Sopot, Zielona Góra, Kołobrzeg and, most of all, the National Festival of Polish Song in Opole, in this article serves as a vehicle to establish how employing the oral history method can shed new light on the history of Polish popular music as the paper shows that the reception of such music for ordinary people completely differed from the intentions of festival organisers and the communist government