"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.
By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited form.
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.
He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the Music worked in all their lives.
Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them.
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.
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. "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
