In the introduction to Stephen Wade’s The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, the author locates his inspiration in the advice of Archie Green: “Always follow the evidence, he counseled, and relish the pursuit, wherever it leads.” Wade, in this monumental and revelatory excursion into the particular nature and character of twelve early Library of Congress field recordings, takes Green’s advice to heart, to say the least. More than anything, this book pursues, with dogged abandon, the evidence left by these recordings, providing a mighty testament to the depth and richness of American vernacular song.
The spare structure of the book—one chapter for each song, preceded by an introduction—belies the analytical complexity of the whole. Each chapter, while corresponding to each particular musical selection, takes a different shape, depending on the promise of the available evidence. While Wade always attempts a panoptic reading of each song, combining musical analyses, textual genealogies, recording histories, philological analyses, and extensive considerations of performer biographies, he weighs the evidence and responds accordingly, and the great strength of the work lies in its willingness to digress—into the life story of a particularly colorful character, or into the possible meaning of an initially inscrutable line or phrase.
On one level, Wade’s close readings proceed in the comparative and annotative fashion of the ballad collection tradition. He takes textual scholarship seriously, often anchoring his discussions in etiological and typological concerns when relevant. In the chapter on Texas Gladden’s “One Morning in May,” for instance, he explores the song’s relationship to “The Unfortunate Rake” cycle, addressing the complex existence of a broadside that became both a New Orleans jazz standard (as “St. James Infirmary”) and a Virginia mountain ballad. Similarly, he traces the protean adventure of “Rock Island Line” from commercial jingle to work song, and “Soldier’s Joy” from English fife tutor, Scottish minuet collection, and Thomas Hardy novel to a Nashville street corner.
Wade never stops with origins, however, and he demonstrates time and again how Library of Congress recordings often acted as vital nodes through which songs leapt from one cultural register to another. A fascinating chapter on Pete Steele’s “Coal Creek March,” for instance, traces the piece to nineteenth-century guitar primers, through Steele’s scintillating banjo tour-de-force, to Pete Seeger showstopper, and subsequently back into instructional musical culture. Similarly, we see the journey of “Bonaparte’s Retreat” from a ruminative Irish pipe march to Bill Stepp’s breakdown to Aaron Copland’s incorporation of the piece in the ballet, Rodeo, and the enigmatic “Sea Lion Woman” from ring game song to John Travolta movie score to indie dirge courtesy of Leslie Feist.
In addition to these dizzying outward travels, Wade delves, in the patient manner of a serious philologist, into the complex and often opaque meanings within song texts. How did singers in northern Mississippi come to sing about a “Sea Lion,” he wonders, and why? Why do so many American fiddle songs reference Napoleon Bonaparte in their titles? Just what does it mean to “walk a log” in Vera Hall’s version of “Another Man Done Gone”? In each case, Wade provides thorough exegesis of the mysteries at hand, synthesizing prior commentary and speculating about the most promising available interpretations. Jelly Roll Morton’s provocative claim that Diamond Joe was a “fairy” notwithstanding, Wade’s thoughtful consideration of Joe’s origin in the name of either an ostentatious rancher or a salvational river boat represents the best discussion to date of this ongoing scholarly debate.
Another strength of the book is its apposite incorporation of musical analysis. Wade, himself an accomplished and acclaimed performer and banjoist, brings this knowledge to bear in illuminating ways. Guitarists will appreciate, for instance, his exhaustive consideration of the history of the “Spanish” and “Vestapol” open-tunings and how selections showcasing those tunings provided a template for later banjo instrumentals. Moreover, discussions like those of Joe Morris’s fiddle fingering and the modality of Luther Strong’s “Glory in the Meetinghouse,” though detailed and somewhat specialized, are always related in some way to the whole. Morris’s fingering betrayed a basis in classical training, Wade explains, and this amplifies our appreciation of his intriguing life story.
In addition to these close musical and textual examinations of the material, perhaps the most impressive and unique achievement of the book lies in the extensive research devoted to performer biographies and the integration of those biographies into the rich body of evidence surrounding each song. In confining himself to songs made on disc cutting machines—the earliest sound recordings made for the Library of Congress’s folk song archive—Wade recalls the master magician devising a seemingly impossible feat of imprisonment and escape. In this early era of folksong collecting, the Lomaxes and their contemporaries kept almost no notes, and little in the way of biographical evidence was retained for future researchers. Not to be deterred, Wade recounts his own follow-up field work in the communities where the songs were recorded, which more often than not succeeded in uncovering revealing layers of biographical detail. Indeed, these passages prove the most riveting reading in the book, particularly when considered alongside the song histories and the beautiful music on the accompanying compact disc. In some cases, the songs fit the lives of their hosts easily, as when we learn that Pete Steele, the performer of “Coal Creek March,” lived his early life as a destitute miner. In other cases, Wade’s detective work reveals disturbing fissures, filling certain songs with pathos and poignant meaning—in the case of Ora Dell Graham, for instance, recorded by Lomax as a somewhat sassy schoolgirl singing “Shortenin’ Bread.” We later learn that she lived a brief life of abject poverty before dying in a tragic car wreck on July 4th, “her singing forever preserved in Thomas Jefferson’s library. A national treasure.”
Although Wade claims no overarching thesis for his study, certain themes do appear, weaving in and out of the disparate investigations: the sublimity of certain gems of vernacular music, notably, and the immanence of art in everyday life. The book, in many ways, constitutes a paean to these ideas, and to what might be called a democratic conception of folksong as a form of expression wandering at liberty through the wilds of American society and culture and resting occasionally (and appropriately) in the nation’s library.
Occasionally, the effect of such a devout and diligent embrace of all of the evidence at hand is to leave the reader somewhat bemused, wondering at the complexity of it all. In the last paragraph of the book, indeed, Wade alludes to the trepidation researchers understandably feel in the face of such complexity, quoting Ben Botkin’s famous phrase, “Culture, like love, laughs at locksmiths.” Wade remains, however, more magician that locksmith throughout, and he departs the scene with a number of safes cracked, chains unbound, and previously locked cages swinging open.
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[Review length: 1141 words • Review posted on January 22, 2014]