Ten voices, from a Blasket Island seanchaí to a Harlem street poet, who carried the world’s stories through a century that kept trying to silence them.

The 20th century should have been fatal to the storyteller. Radio, film, television, and the printed book all promised to do the remembering for us, and the old chains of oral transmission, mouth to ear across generations, frayed almost everywhere at once. Yet the same century produced tape recorders, long-playing records, and a wave of scholars, broadcasters, and performers determined that the human voice would not be edited out of art. The result was not preservation under glass but reinvention: the spoken word walked out of the village and onto the concert stage and the vinyl record.

The ten gathered here were chosen for influence rather than fame. Each one changed how stories were told, heard, or valued, and together they span the century’s range, from a griot on Malian radio to a folklorist in the Florida backwoods to the reggae poetry of Black Britain. Some are famous, and a couple should be genuine discoveries. They appear in no particular order, because keeping traditions alive was never a competition, and a century of the human voice is better heard as a chorus than a countdown.

1. Peig Sayers

1873-1958

On the Great Blasket, a bare rock off the Kerry coast, Peig Sayers held perhaps the richest story hoard in the Irish language, and she could not read a word of it. Folklorists came by boat: Robin Flower, Kenneth Jackson, and the collector Seosamh Ó Dálaigh, who took down hundreds of her tales, ghost stories, and songs. Dictated to her son and published in 1936, her autobiography “Peig” became so fixed a schoolroom text that generations of Irish teenagers grew to resent it, a fate that says more about curricula than about her art. Start with “An Old Woman’s Reflections,” where her voice comes through warm and unsentimental.

2. Bazoumana Sissoko

The Old Lion of Mali

Blind from birth and known across Mali as Le Vieux Lion, the Old Lion, Bazoumana Sissoko was the griot a whole nation woke up to, his voice and his ngoni opening the day on national radio. Born around 1890 in the Ségou region, he carried the Bambara epics and the deep history of the old kingdoms, refusing the easy money of flattering the powerful and singing instead of courage, lineage, and independence. He is even credited with composing the music for Mali’s national anthem. After the 1968 coup he withdrew from public life, and his silence only deepened the legend. Any of the “Musique du Mali” recordings issued under the Vieux Lion name will show you why.

3. Amadou Hampâté Bâ

1900-1991

If one sentence defines the century’s fight to save oral culture, it is his: in Africa, when an old man dies, a library burns. The Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ spent his life proving the point, filling notebooks with the Fulani and Bambara traditions of the Sahel and insisting, at UNESCO and everywhere else, that the spoken word was rigorous knowledge, not a quaint survival. A devoted student of the Sufi sage Tierno Bokar, he turned oral memory into literature with the novel “The Fortunes of Wangrin” and the memoir “Amkoullel, l’enfant peul.” More than any single storyteller, he changed how the world values storytellers. Begin with “Amkoullel,” his luminous account of a Peul childhood.

4. Zora Neale Hurston

1891-1960

Trained as an anthropologist under Franz Boas at Barnard, Zora Neale Hurston went home to the Black South with a notebook and an ear no textbook could teach. In Eatonville, the all-Black Florida town where she grew up, and later in the work camps of Polk County and the hoodoo rooms of New Orleans, she gathered the tales, sermons, and tall stories that white folklore had ignored. “Mules and Men,” published in 1935, was the first book of African American folklore collected and shaped by an African American, and she set down its voices in their own music rather than flattening them into standard English. Start with “Mules and Men” and hear a whole culture talk.

5. Dylan Thomas

1914-1953

Dylan Thomas made poetry an event you could hear. That famous Welsh baritone turned public readings and radio broadcasts into performance rather than recitation, and on 22 February 1952 he stepped into a New York studio for a fledgling label called Caedmon. The resulting record, anchored by “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” is widely credited with launching the spoken-word LP and, with it, the modern audiobook. He died the next year at 39, but the recordings and his play for voices, “Under Milk Wood,” kept his sound alive. Start with that Caedmon reading.

6. Louise Bennett-Coverley

Miss Lou

For most of her life, respectable Jamaica treated Patois as broken English, something to be corrected out of children. Louise Bennett-Coverley, Miss Lou to everyone, spent fifty years proving it was a language with a literature of its own, performing poems, folk songs, and Anancy spider tales in the people’s tongue with a comic timing that could fill a theater. Her radio monologues and the children’s show “Ring Ding” taught a generation the stories that belonged to them. Collections such as “Jamaica Labrish” put the vernacular on the page, and every dub poet and dancehall deejay who followed owes her a debt. Start with “Jamaica Labrish,” then find a recording and hear her comic timing.

7. Duncan Williamson

1928-2007

Born in a bow tent on the shore of Loch Fyne, one of sixteen children in a Scottish Traveller family, Duncan Williamson grew up inside a living library of stories and ballads. By the time folklorists caught up with him he was said to hold hundreds of tales and hundreds of songs, many never written down anywhere, a repertoire the collector Hamish Henderson thought unmatched among the Travelling people. His American wife, the folklorist Linda Williamson, recorded and edited him into print, and his warm, unhurried telling helped power Scotland’s storytelling revival. Books like “Fireside Tales of the Traveller Children” and “Tales of the Seal People” carry the selkie lore of the west coast. Start with the seal-people stories.

8. The Last Poets

Founded 1968

On what would have been Malcolm X’s birthday, 19 May 1968, a group of young poets gathered in a Harlem park and took a name from a South African poem: the last poets before the age of the gun. Over spare hand drums, Abiodun Oyewole, Umar Bin Hassan, and Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin turned the African American arts of preaching, signifying, and the dozens into blunt, rhythmic performance poetry. Their 1970 debut album reached the top ten of the American R&B albums chart and put the ancestral spoken word on vinyl, and critics have called them the group that almost single-handedly laid the groundwork for hip-hop. Start with “When the Revolution Comes.”

9. Jackie Torrence

The Story Lady

Jackie Torrence was a reference librarian in High Point, North Carolina, when a children’s librarian fell ill and she stepped in to tell stories, and a career was born that a whole country would come to know as “The Story Lady.” She had learned Brer Rabbit and Appalachian ghost tales at her grandfather’s knee on a North Carolina creek, stories carried down from enslaved ancestors, whose trickster humor was once a coded language of survival. She gave them a full-bodied, character-voiced delivery that could hush a room of restless children or a hall of adults. Discovered through the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, she became one of the faces of America’s storytelling revival, reportedly booking dozens of engagements in a single day. Start with any of her recorded Brer Rabbit tellings.

10. Linton Kwesi Johnson

Born 1952

Brought from Chapelton, Jamaica, to Brixton at eleven, Linton Kwesi Johnson grew up to give Black Britain a voice in its own rhythm. He is the pioneer of dub poetry, verse in Jamaican patois written to the pulse of reggae bass, and on albums like “Dread Beat an’ Blood” and “Bass Culture,” made with producer Dennis Bovell, he chronicled police harassment, uprising, and endurance in 1970s and 1980s Britain, in verse that was an essential ancestor of rap. In 2002 he became only the second living poet, and the first Black one, published in Penguin Modern Classics. Start with “Bass Culture,” loud.

Final thoughts

What unites a Blasket seanchaí and a Harlem street poet is a single stubborn conviction: that a story spoken aloud, in the teller’s own tongue and rhythm, carries something the printed page cannot hold. These ten worked the whole span of that belief, from Peig Sayers and Bazoumana Sissoko guarding inherited epics, through Hurston and Miss Lou writing the vernacular into the record, to the Last Poets and Linton Kwesi Johnson turning the ancient art into new forms. Between them they made sure the oldest human technology, one person telling another a story, arrived intact on the far side of the age of mass media.

No list of ten can hold a century of voices, and two names pressed hard at the door. Gil Scott-Heron, whose “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” stands beside the Last Poets at the headwaters of spoken word, could as easily have taken a place here, as could Ruth Sawyer, the American writer whose 1942 book “The Way of the Storyteller” helped turn the library story hour into a serious craft. Treat this list as an opening rather than a last word, and follow the thread further through CreARTivity’s storytelling and traditions pages, where the human voice keeps its long conversation going.

Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article said that the debut album of The Last Poets reached the American top ten. The correct information is that it reached the top ten of the R&B albums chart.

Sources consulted

Wikipedia, The Last Poets (album)