Awards

• Winner of <DIV>Judith McCulloh Public Sector Award, Society for Ethnomusicology, 2016. ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, 2013. Award for Excellence for Best Research in 2013
• Winner of <DIV>Judith McCulloh Public Sector Award, Society for Ethnomusicology, 2016. ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, 2013. Award for Excellence for Best Research in 2016

Overview

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the childrens play song Shortenin Bread, the fiddle tune Bonapartes Retreat, the blues song Another Man Done Gone, and the spiritual Aint No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbours comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on the Librarys recording machine in a rendering of Rock Island Line; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme Pullin the Skiff; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into Glory in the Meetinghouse. Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individualsdomestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and minerswhose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The book also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and 40s. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, amplifying traditions gifts, Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song Shortenin' Bread, the fiddle tune Bonaparte's Retreat, the blues Another Man Done Gone, and the spiritual Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on the Library's recording machine in a rendering of Rock Island Line ; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme Pullin' the Skiff ; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into Glory in the Meetinghouse. Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, amplifying tradition's gifts, Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The book also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.

Full Product Details

9780252036880

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Reviews

<p> A thorough and creative exploration of the histories of recordings made for the Library of Congress in the 1930s and the artists who made them. Stephen Wade has gathered a prodigious quantity of new information and left no stone unturned. Of interest and use to anyone interested in American music. --Norm Cohen, author of Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong <p>

A thorough and creative exploration of the histories of recordings made for the Library of Congress in the 1930s and the artists who made them. Stephen Wade has gathered a prodigious quantity of new information and left no stone unturned. Of interest and use to anyone interested in American music. Norm Cohen, author of Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong In revisiting the human transactions at the heart of these recordings, Wade essentially grants the songs a new life for a new age. Among the book's many virtues are its lively and imaginative narrative interpolations, its vivid song descriptions, its fascinating investigative work, its many colorful personalities and absorbing life-histories, and its often astonishingly trenchant accumulation of detail. A magisterial, monumental book of tremendous sympathy, scope, and imaginativeness. Robert Cantwell, author of If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture

A thorough and creative exploration of the histories of recordings made for the Library of Congress in the 1930s and the artists who made them. Stephen Wade has gathered a prodigious quantity of new information and left no stone unturned. Of interest and use to anyone interested in American music. Norm Cohen, author of Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong In revisiting the human transactions at the heart of these recordings, Wade essentially grants the songs a new life for a new age. Among the book's many virtues are its lively and imaginative narrative interpolations, its vivid song descriptions, its fascinating investigative work, its many colorful personalities and absorbing life-histories, and its often astonishingly trenchant accumulation of detail. A magisterial, monumental book of tremendous sympathy, scope, and imaginativeness. Robert Cantwell, author of If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture University of Illinois Press publishes Stephen Wades book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings And The American Experience in September. It takes as its starting point the thirteen iconic performances captured on the library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942. R2, July 2012 Following in Mr. [Alan] Lomaxs footsteps, Mr. Wade went back into the field to track down the descendants of 12 of the near-forgotten musicians who recorded for the Library of Congress between 1934 and 1942. He has turned his findings into an extraordinary book called The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience that was published earlier this month by the University of Illinois Press. Its a masterpiece of humane scholarshipbut one that reads like a detective story. Wall Street Journal, September 2012 A compelling and handsomely produced account of his encounters, accompanied by a fine CD Wade is especially good on the origins and evolution of the music, and the ways in which individual singers adapted and subverted lyrics in order to help make sense of their lives and to mock the incongruities around them Superbly illustrated and with a hundred pages of notes and bibliography, The Beautiful Music All Around Us is at once an essential reference work and a thoroughly enjoyable book. - Lou Glandfield, Times Literary Supplement, October 2012 Musician and folklorist Stephen Wade dissects and celebrates the vast diversity of American culture in The Beautiful Music All Around Us, his book drawn from the Library of Congress vast holdings of field recordings made from 1934 to 1942... These stories and the recordings capturing the voices of everyday people, not pop stars simply crackle. LA Times We are introduced to a cast of ordinary-seeming characters with extraordinary stories to tell of another America, an America of largely unheralded individualswhose music has become part of the bigger American story Wade, in a wonderfully engaging style that roams well beyond the parameters of stuffy academia, brings to vivid life the makers of such songs as Bonapartes Retreat, Sea Lion Woman, and One Morning in May, reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions, and places the whole in historical, social and cultural contexts. And if thats not enough, theres an accompanying CD featuring all thirteen tracks. - R2 (Rock-n-Reel) Magazine, November 2012 The authors approach is both impressively academic and detailed, and inspired by empathy for the performers and for their surviving descendants and friends, who provided most of Wades own interviews. Wade creatively uses each of the chosen songs as a touchstone for a chapter and then wanders far from the song and its performer, backwards and forwards through time. - Songlines

Author Information

Musician, recording artist, and writer Stephen Wade is best known for his long-running stage performances of Banjo Dancing and On the Way Home. He also produced and annotated the Rounder CD collection that gave rise to this book, A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings. Since 1996 his occasional commentaries on folksongs and traditional tunes have appeared on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

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