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 hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that
presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the
1930s and '40s.