"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.
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