Social Singing as an Aspect of the Twentieth-Century Lifestyle through the Eyes of Antonín Doležal, a Czech Obstetrician and Singer of Everyday Life

The study is based on the complementarity of ethnomusicology and oral history; it introduces Antonín Doležal, a leading Czech obstetrician, amateur singer and bearer of the tradition of social singing. His biographical narrative relies not only on his memories of particular songs. Doležal is also a prominent witness to the transformations of forms and meanings of singing situations and occasions for social singing as an aspect of the twentieth-century lifestyle. He is a good example to demonstrate the functions of songs as possible key vehicles of memory that—in the course of his story—help recall significant contents of communicative memory, referring also to collective cultural memory concerning Czechoslovakia in the 1930s−1980s in this case. The study shows how the personal repertoire and remembering the occasions to sing and their reflections can stand out from the background of the biographical line as a meaningful mirror of the relation of a contemporary to the family, sociocultural environment, and region, as well as to the interpretation of essential stages of and events in the Czech history and everyday life in the twentieth century.