The Beautiful Music All Around Us

by Wade, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780252036880
• ISBN10: 0252036883
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-08-10
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

The Beautiful Music All Around Uspresents 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 Usbring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, school children, 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.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Bill Stepp: Retreat across America	p. 25
Kelly Pace: Coworker in the Kingdom of Culture	p. 47
Ora Dell Graham: A Little Black Girl from Mississippi	p. 75
Christine and Katherine Shipp: In a Chromatic Light	p. 105
Nashville Washboard Band: Something Out of Nothing	p. 129
Vera Hall: The Life That We Live	p. 153
Bozie Sturdivant: A Song That Went with Him	p. 179
Pete Steele: ItÆs What Folks Do	p. 207
Texas Gladden: From Here to the Mississippi	p. 237
Luther Strong: Way behind His Time	p. 267
Charlie Butler: Call Me to Home	p. 297
Jess Morris: Boiled Shirt and Cowboy Boots	p. 327
Notes	p. 361
Works Cited	p. 423
A Note on the Recording	p. 447
Index	p. 449
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