This is pretty incredible. Go to: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html

The page is "American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project 1936 - 1940." From that page, you can choose a state and actually read transcripts of interviews.

A paragraph from a interview with Gus Schroeder of Lake County, Oregon:

"...'Nother time a joke was played was once when Sam Hadley got drunk an' we laid him out on a billiard table an' covered him with a cloth. It must have bin an old tablecloth or somethin', cause it was white. An' then Minor Wallace he was a preacher's son and he knew jest what to say [md] he preached a funeral sermon over Sam. Gosh Almighty! but that Minor Wallace could talk. He sure would of made a good preacher. While he was preachin' Sam's funeral oration, Sam come to out of his sleep. An' of all the cussin' you ever hear! Sam was good at that. He was good lookin', too. Once when he was drunk I took a cork an' stuck it full of matches. I fast'n'd the cork to a little stick, split at one end, then I put the split and on Sam's nose an' lit the matches and hollered "Fire!" It didn't burn him any, too far away from his face for that, but it did black him aplenty. Sam was mad at me a long time for doin' that."