The beautiful music all around us: field recordings and the American experience

Abstract

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to Mississippi Delta and Great Plains. Including children's play song Shortenin' Bread, fiddle tune Bonaparte's Retreat, blues Another Man Done Gone, and 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 golden age of Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only words and tunes of traditional songs but also sounds of life in which performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs sights and sounds of recording sessions themselves and how 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 Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on the Library's recording machine in a rendering of Rock Island Line; Ora Dell Graham being called away from schoolyard to sing jump-rope rhyme Pullin' Skiff; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into Glory in Meetinghouse. Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles 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, 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 wider American musical soundscape. The paperback edition does not include an accompanying CD.