The Beautiful Music All Around Us

“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 Wade’s 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] Lomax’s 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. It’s a masterpiece of humane scholarship - but 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 individuals…whose 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 ‘Bonaparte’s 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 that’s not enough, there’s an accompanying CD featuring all thirteen tracks.” - R2 (Rock-n-Reel) Magazine, November 2012 “The author’s 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 Wade’s 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