Oral histories have cropped up in big numbers over recent years, in books and magazines and on websites.

The form — plain, “uncensored” interviews with subjects, exposing “true voices” (those words so often associated with oral histories) — took off under Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Studs Terkel (1912-2008), who compiled interview upon interview with everyday Americans for numerous works.

The form became a favorite for musicians and bands in telling their sagas. These days it’s hard to come across a publication that doesn’t offer an oral history of someone or something, whether it’s Michael Bay, a sitcom character or the origins of Ms. magazine. The Daily gets meta with some of the best raconteurs of the most famous oral histories out there.

LEGS McNEIL (co-author, “Please Kill Me,” 1996, and “The Other Hollywood,” 2005): Studs Terkel was really important — just the humanity of getting people to tell their stories of World War II or the Depression was quite astonishing. I guess they — like rock and roll, porn and everything else — were considered trash. You know, the bottom of the barrel.

MYRNA KATZ FROMMER (co-author, “It Happened in Manhattan,” 2003, and others): At Dartmouth College, we’ve been teaching this [oral history] course for 15 years. 

HARVEY FROMMER (co-author, “It Happened in Manhattan” and others): The first book we read is “Plain Speaking” (1974), which is an oral biography of Harry Truman by Meryl Miller. It sold millions of copies. Then we have Studs Terkel’s “The Good War” (1984).

SYDNEY LEWIS (author, “Hospital: The Oral History of Cook County Hospital,” 1996): I met Studs waitressing in Chicago. I was trying to get his order and he was, you know, interviewing me. I said, “You know, I read “Working” [1974] and I loved “Working,” but right now I am working. Can you just tell me what you want to drink?” I used to tease him: “I don’t know how you get these interviews. You never shut up.”

I became the program department’s administrative assistant at WFMT Radio. We worked together on a daily basis. The woman who had been doing his transcribing passed away, so I inherited the job. Whenever [Studs] was working on a book, I helped. The first one [was] “The Good War.” My priority was always helping him. I just thought that was the most useful thing I could do. For me, “Hospital” was my perfect book because it was a contained world.

[Studs] just had an amazing ability to be so present and make you feel safe. You could go deep inside yourself. I was interviewed by him for “Race” [1992], not under my own name. My mom’s Jamaican, so I was mixed race. Back in the day, when that wasn’t quite common, he thought I was Jewish because I came from New York.

JEAN STEIN (author, “Edie,” 1982): Studs Terkel was a great friend over the years. He cared deeply about other human beings, which is the crucial element in being effective as an interviewer [for] the kind of books we’ve done.

KATZ-FROMMER: The third book [for the course] is our book, “It Happened in Manhattan” — the postwar years, when it became a world-class metropolis. 

FROMMER: And then we have “Voices of Freedom” [about the civil rights movement]. It’s one of the great oral history books. 

STEVE FAYER (co-author, “Voices of Freedom”): I had never written a book before. There was a lot of pressure to get it right. I had never worked on a national television documentary series until “Eyes on the Prize” [1987-90]; there was a lot of pressure to get that right.

It was always going to be an oral history. I’ve always felt it’s more than that. We had a large staff: Aside from the television research people, we had book research people. When I started to cut together those interviews, the book people came to me and said, “Hey! You’re cutting the oral histories too much like you’re cutting a film. Let this thing breathe more. We want this to be a 700-page book.” 

SARAH FLYNN (co-editor, “Voices of Freedom”): I came in fairly late in the project. “Eyes on the Prize” had been in progress for a dozen years. I did spend a year going through, I think, 10,000 pages of interview transcripts, 1,000 interviews. It’s the single proudest moment of my life in terms of being involved with a book project. 

ERIC MARCUS (author, “Making Gay History,” 1993): An editor asked me to do an oral history of the gay civil rights movement. I wasn’t particularly interested in writing history. I find it very boring for the most part and quite dry. I found that doing interviews with people who were very much alive brought history to life. 

JAMES ANDREW MILLER (co-author, “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” 2005, and “Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN,” 2011): Studs Terkel did a great job in terms of time and place. But for me, at least, with “Edie,” the people really jumped off the page. The first time I read it, I did not stop until I finished. 

JEAN STEIN: Edie Sedgwick was a close personal friend of mine, and I was deeply shocked by her death. The idea to do the book came from my wish to have her remembered since she was almost forgotten by the time she died. When the book was about three-fourths completed, I asked George Plimpton to help me in the editing process. 

GEORGE PLIMPTON (author, “Truman Capote,” 1998; editor, “Edie”; to Gadfly, 1998): It’s like eavesdropping on a huge cocktail party. 

GILLIAN McCAIN (co-author, “Please Kill Me”): Legs started out writing a book with Dee Dee [Ramone], an oral history, and it didn’t work out. I said, “This topic’s so much broader. You’ve got to do the history of New York punk as an oral history.” And he said, “OK, wanna do it with me?” We had both been huge fans of Edie. I couldn’t believe there weren’t more oral histories out there. It’s such a great form. 

LEGS McNEIL: We were always wondering why didn’t someone take this form and do something else with it. We found out after four years of doing “Please Kill Me”: It’s just too f***ing hard. 

MARC SPITZ (co-author, “We Got the Neutron Bomb,” 2001): I was working in Shakespeare & Co. on lower Broadway [in New York City]. I remember distinctly the day “Please Kill Me” came out of the box, going down to the stockroom and grabbing it. You know how there are records that you give to your friends? That was the book that I literally would give to people. 

LEGS McNEIL: The reason “Please Kill Me” reads so well, I think, is because at the very end of it, for two and a half days straight, we read it out loud. When you hear it out loud, you really hear when something doesn’t work. 

Vanity Fair was considering excepting it. I went to our publisher, Morgan Entrekin, and said, “Morgan, do you really think Vanity Fair is going to excerpt this?” He said, “No, Legs. It’s about a bunch of junkies and whores who didn’t sell any records.” But 16 years later, it’s still selling. 

MARC SPITZ: My book came out when “Behind the Music” was at sort of its cultural peak. It’s not coincidental, I don’t think. There’s a certain pleasure in reading a good, engaging oral history that’s not any different than watching a really well done talking-head documentary. 

JASON MATLOFF (author, “Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing’ Turns 20,” Los Angeles Times, 2009): No offense to writers, obviously, but I like hearing things from people’s mouths as much as possible. 

SEAN FENNESSEY (editor, GQ.com; author, “Blow-Up,”a Michael Bay oral history): I think the form is increasingly Web-friendly more than anything else, just because we’e in sort of this sound-bite moment. What I was looking for when the Michael Bay piece went up was what people were quoting on Twitter. That was basically the most exciting thing to me. 

LANE BROWN (editor, Grantland): [Oral histories are] one of our go-to moves for sure. It’s hard to do them on any regular schedule because they are a ton of work. The National oral history was two months in the making. Poor Robert Mays, our edit assistant, was transcribing for our first two months. As soon as he landed in Los Angeles, he got off the plane and transcribed from March until May.

MARCUS: I wound up with severe tendinitis from transcribing. I went to sleep with Ace bandages wrapped around my wrists. 

BROWN: For the “Friday Night Lights” oral history, the Grantland conference room looked like John Nash’s tool shed in “A Beautiful Mind.”

FROMMER: Without Google you’d be lost, and so would we. 

TERRY PLUTO (author, “Loose Balls,” a players’ history of the American Basketball Association, 1991): It’s amazing how little you could verify. It’s almost like being a policeman where there’s a five-car wreck. A couple of the guys I wanted to talk to were in jail or drug rehab. You couldn’t even find them. 

MARCUS: Many of the people who were involved in the early gay rights movement took a pseudonym: It was too dangerous to be open about who you were. So it was very hard to find people. One woman, Lisa Ben — the letters of her name [spell] “lesbian” — wrote a newsletter for lesbians in 1947. It took me 20 or 25 phone calls to track her down. You couldn’t email people. It was virtually all by phone. 

JAMES ANDREW MILLER: One of the things that I particularly loved in “Live From New York” was the Rashomon effect. Whether it’s a Vanity Fair oral history, or an oral history on Grantland, there’s so many different forks in the road, so many times when you have a choice of how to approach the material. The ESPN book, even though it was 700 pages long, you could also define it by what wasn’t there. 

PLUTO: Thankfully, a lot of the ABA people began to talk to each other. They really helped me because they were anxious to tell their story. Dr. J loved talking about the ABA. That really played into it — well-known people wanted these stories out. 

ROB TANNENBAUM (co-author, “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” 2011): The advantage a music oral history has is that musicians tend to be outrageous figures. Anytime you’re mixing huge budgets, vanity, drugs and success, there are going to be some good stories. 

RONALD BAYER (co-author, “AIDS Doctors: Voices from the Epidemic,” 2002): Each of us had moments that were stunning, whether it was someone bringing in a plate of cookies to Gerry [Oppenheimer, co-author] during a second interview, after having been very skeptical in the first interview, or me sitting in a room with a stranger, conducting an interview, and suddenly this man begins to weep. 

SPITZ: I do theater, too, and there’s a little bit of playwriting to it. You have to have that dialogue ear. 

MARCUS: The copy editor on the original edition made everyone sound similar. She had a drag queen from the Bronx speaking perfect English — from Puerto Rico, no less. I wrote thousands of stets: “Put it back, put it back!” 

SPITZ: I personally don’t like the ones that have the sort of “And then in 1994,” that mystery voice. If you can pull one off without it, then you’ve got something. 

McCAIN: Yeah, it’s cheating. That turns me off. 

MARCUS: I’ve seen oral histories where every single person in the book sounds the same. I know somebody who did one. It turned out he didn’t actually tape the interviews: He took notes. 

McCAIN: I kind of avoid oral histories. I feel like I’m either going to be editing it in my head — “Why didn’t he take out that off line?” — or it’s going to be really good and I’m going to be jealous. 

SPITZ: Someone who pulls it off in book form, they have my respect forever. I don’t care what else they write. They can write bad poetry for the rest of their life and I would still give it up. 

FENNESSEY: There’s obviously a torrent of them coming. 

SPITZ: People are just fatigued now. It’s a great form, but I too have read some that have made my heart sink. It has to be a genuine conversation, and the spirit of that has to be in the text, or it’s going to be flat. 

PLUTO: You have to be careful how you use it. I’ve got a couple oral histories on my shelf, and it’s just like, “Hit the pause button here.” 

McCAIN: I just read an oral history, “Groovy Bob,” about Robert Frasier, an art gallery owner in London in the ’60s who was friends with the Rolling Stones. And it was so tiring. It would be, like, Marianne Faithfull saying, “Bob was very elegant and dandy and used to wear this.” And Mick Jagger saying, “He always had a great sense of dress.” It didn’t build. It was so annoying. 

MARK YARM (author, “Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge”): Do you watch [the NBC comedy] “Community”? There’s this character called Magnitude who basically has one catch phrase, “pop-pop.” A few months ago, a comedy site did an oral history on that character, who’s had probably 15 minutes screen time total. I‘m assuming the joke was “Here’s an oral history about something super-insignificant.” 

BROWN: Bill [Simmons, Grantland’s editor-in-chief] said, “I’d read an oral history of almost anything.” 

YARM: So you’re doing the oral history of oral histories that everyone has always posited should be done? 

JASON MATLOFF: At least the people [you’re interviewing] probably don’t have publicists. 

Additional thanks: Nancy Adair (co-author, “Word Is Out,” 1978), Craig Marks (co-author, “I Want My MTV”), Gerald M. Oppenheimer (co-author, “AIDS Doctors”), Peter Pavia (co-author, “The Other Hollywood”).