Years from now, after I'm gone, someone will listen to what I've done and know I was here. They may not know or care who I was, but they'll hear my guitars speaking for me.

—Chet Atkins

You don’t have to be a fan of country music to recognize the pride and sense of history in the words of this ingenious musician. His guitar was his voice, a powerful and influential one, and the stories he told in that voice are still affecting the people—and they are legion—who listen.

I believe that a sense of history calls us to listen to the past, and we at the Missouri History Museum are pledged to use every facility to make that past audible to our community. The museum itself, the Library and Research Center, our outreach programs, and our plans for the future take advantage of state-of-the-art resources and innovative concepts that are works in progress. In our online magazine we gratefully seize the opportunity provided by technology that was surely beyond the imagination of the Lemp family, the outlaw Polk Wells, and most of the ancestors in our genealogy databases.

We listen here to Katherine Dunham’s daughter, Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt, who heard her mother’s voice, and her father’s, in a different key from what most of us experienced.

We hear tales of our beloved World’s Fair, but told in an interesting variety of accents and pitches, from the voice of a modern poet, a former St. Louisan, to the comments of participants in an Elderhostel day of discovery at the Museum.

All these stories and more are yours for the listening in this issue of Voices. Enjoy, remember, and perhaps most importantly, re-tell.

Robert R. Archibald, Ph.D.
President, Missouri History Museum