If asked to find a true story on the internet today, the comment section under a YouTube video is hardly where you would think to look. YouTube has an often-justified reputation as something of a cesspit, with bots, banality and extreme political content abounding. But, like Walt Whitman, it contains multitudes. During my PhD research on political music history, the site was an indispensable source for rare songs and performances. Perhaps you’ve noticed the unusual tone of the comments underneath popular songs of the last century. A genre has arisen without anyone deciding it: the nostalgic, confessional paragraph recalling some deep sense memory from the author’s past, triggered by the music. These connect to the circumstances of the song’s creation and content in ways both straightforward and complex. The comments section of Peter, Paul and Mary’s Leaving on a Jet Plane contains stories from people who were drafted into the US military during the Vietnam war. Luke Kelly’s Scorn Not His Simplicity has many personal narratives of disability and parenthood. Elbow’s One Day Like This triggered memories of countless weddings, Christenings, and illnesses overcome. The writer Mark Slutsky dubbed the genre “Sad YouTube”, and for some years maintained a blog gathering some of the best examples. The stories are startling in their rawness and honesty. Struck by the music, people are spontaneously sharing the most precious memories of their lives with any stranger who cares to listen. Mostly non-professional writers, their prose is loose and unedited, but full of personal specificity and period texture. We might regard these as ephemera, disconnected anecdotes in a vast sea of other unprocessed information. But people’s memories, and the way they choose to recount them, have worth beyond the confines of what we consider to be capital-H History. The great theoretician of oral history Penny Summerfield once noted “the provocative capacity of individual life stories to draw attention to experiences that are ignored or marginalised in mainstream historiography, and to require us to reconsider what we mean by ‘history’.” As anyone who has conducted an interview will know, subjects have a habit of talking about what they consider important, not necessarily what the interviewer does. People do not speak in clear, concise descriptions of what their time was like, but in fractured, elliptical, sometimes contradictory remembrances structured by what came after; their regrets, their triumphs, the things that didn’t make sense then, but do now. In doing so, as Dr Sarah O’Brien has noted, they frequently produce more interesting material than the historian was looking for. This enormous online trove is an accidental, largely uncatalogued archive of international oral history.Why is music so generative of oral history? Perhaps it has something to do with both the perfection of musical recording and the fallibility of human memory. At 70, it’s impossible to inhabit the self you were at 20, but Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide sounds precisely the same as it did then, and hearing it provides a window through which you can see. Songs are anchors of meaning in our long, turbulent lives. [ Emer McLysaght: I worry I might be doing things only to capture them on my phoneOpens in new window ]Thinking of a piece of art we loved when younger also reminds us of our own finitude, and in turn sparks the desire to pass on some memory of our days, even if only to the readers of comment sections. As one commenter wrote: “Life changes but the song always brings back the old memory. No do overs!!”What’s clear is that people want to remember, and in turn they want to be remembered. Part of our general drift towards alienation and loneliness is the sense that people have no one with whom to share stories. The 19th and 20th centuries saw enormous efforts to gather oral history and folklore, from the New Deal-era WPA Slave Narrative Collection to our own Folklore Commission, set up in 1935, which became the National Folklore Collection and latterly Dúchas. Collection of such material gradually evolved from nationalist projects to something more like social history. So what would this YouTube comment archive look like? It would capture these small pieces of history and make them searchable by song, artist, time, genre, and subject. The creation of historical databases, whatever their limitation, is enormously beneficial for those trying to reconstruct the past, be they academics, artists, or anyone else. Through the sheer volume of different perspectives and in tandem with traditional archives, we could reconstruct eras of music, culture, and social life. [ The internet is deciding what to forgetOpens in new window ]There are other admirable internet archival projects, but nothing which seeks to isolate and examine this particular accidental archive. It would be tendentious to suggest that as Irish people we hold some special ability or inclination to hold on to old stories, but on the other hand, why not us? A partnership with an existing academic or cultural institution could provide the infrastructure, and a comparatively modest level of funding could employ researchers, historians and collectors in a great project of human memory. YouTube has existed for 21 years now, which means that some significant fragment of the comments that exist are from people who have since died. For some, this may conceivably be their only written record. At a time when we are enduring a cacophony of anodyne, soulless, machine-produced content, there is a chorus of real human memory waiting to be heard. Think of what it could do for our understanding of ourselves if we could just listen.