Beautiful Music All Around Us

Musician, recording artist, and writer Stephen Wade is best known for his long-running stage performances of Banjo Dancing and On the Way Home. He also produced and annotated the Rounder CD collection that gave rise to this book, A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings. Since 1996 his occasional commentaries on folksongs and traditional tunes have appeared on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Judith McCulloh Public Sector Award, Society for Ethnomusicology, 2016. ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, 2013. Award for Excellence for Best Research in Folk, Ethnic, or World Music, Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2013.  "Extraordinary. . . . A masterpiece of humane scholarship.”--The Wall Street Journal“These stories and the recordings - capturing the voices of everyday people, not pop stars - simply crackle.”-Los Angeles Times"Offers an understanding not only of a musical thread vital to American culture, but of America itself."--Publishers Weekly "Astonishing. . . . These stories are compelling, moving and revelatory."--Chicago Tribune"As compelling as a good detective story, this investigation of field recordings of a bygone era will be embraced by music fans.  This book reminds readers that they don't need pop icons to experience passionate music."--Library Journal"A unique, personal, thoroughly documented book, a labor of love. . . . valuable for those with an interest in folklore, popular music, southern cultures, and race relations. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice "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"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."--Times Literary Supplement  "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 "Wonderfully evocative of a lost America."--Shepherd Express"Combines the persistence of an investigative reporter with the loving hand of a storyteller who keeps peeling away the layers of the lives of his subjects. . . . Remarkable."--The Christian Science Monitor