The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience (Music in American Life)

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. 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. 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.
Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the 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 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. 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, the 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 the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.

Arts & Photography

WADE, Stephen

Music

University of Illinois Press

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. 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. 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.
Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the 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 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. 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, the 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 the wider American musical soundscape. The paperback edition does not include an accompanying CD.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

A critical analysis of the fiction of Christopher Isherwood discusses his literary phases and focuses on the autobiographical and religious aspects of his work

Christopher Isherwood (Modern Novelists)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

An overview of 19th- and 20th-century writing from the British Isles shows a constant interplay between metropolitan centers and regional peripheries―an interplay that points to the basic importance of place and belonging in literary creation and evaluation. This volume examines the relationship between British literature―including poetry, fiction, biography, and drama―and regional consciousness in the Victorian and modern periods, introducing the reader to a range of responses to the profound feelings of belonging engendered by the sense of place. The works covered are a mixture of familiar classics and less well-known writings from working-class writers or forgotten writers who were successful in their era. After accounting for the emergence of regional writing in the early 19th century, the author analyzes the development of regional writing in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, focusing on issues such as the sociopolitical context of the regional novel, the print and literary cultures around regional presses, and the place of documentary in regional consciousness.

In My Own Shire: Region and Belonging in British Writing, 1840-1970 (Contributions to the Study of World Literature)

British & Irish

Praeger

Lincolnshire Murders is a collection of the stories behind some of the murders in the county since about 1850.

Lincolnshire Murders

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

The History Press

Square Mile Bobbies is a history and casebook of the City of London Police between 1839, when the force was first established after general recognition that London was not being policed effectively, and World War II. During this time the City Police were involved in a succession of major cases, from the attempted assassination of the Rothschilds in 1862 and detective’s pursuit of forgers in 1873, to Jack the Ripper’s brutal killing of Catherine Eddowes in 1888 and the notorious siege of Sidney Street in 1911. This chronicle of violent deaths, robberies, forgeries, and fraudsters is a fascinating look at the social history of the City Police in the chronicles of crime.

Square Mile Bobbies: The City of London Police 1829-1949

Historical

Gathers together the stories of criminals hanged at York from the middle of the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century when Leeds superseded York as the place where capital punishment was carried out. This book is illustrated with photographs, news cuttings and engravings.

Hanged at York

History

Europe

Hanged at Lincoln

Covering the lives and achievements of five English intelligence officers involved in wars at home and abroad between 1870 and 1918, this exceptionally researched book offers an insight into spying in the age of Victoria. Including material from little-known sources such as memoirs, old biographies and information from M15 and the police history archives, this book is a more detailed sequel to Wade's earlier work, Spies in the Empire. The book examines the social and political context of Victorian spying and the role of intelligence in the Anglo-Boer wars as well as case studies on five intriguing characters: William Melville, Sir John Ardagh, Reginald Wingate and Rudolf Slatin, and William Robertson. Responding to a dearth of books covering this topic, Wade both presents fascinating biographies of some of the most significant figures in the history of intelligence as well as a snapshot of a time in which the experts and amateurs who would eventually become M15 struggled against bias, denigration and confusion.

Victoria's Spymasters: Empire and Espionage

More on the Word-Hoard: The Work of Seamus Heaney

Borgo Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WADE, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by WADE, Stephen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WADE, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience (Music in American Life)

The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience (Music in American Life)

Christopher Isherwood (Modern Novelists)

In My Own Shire: Region and Belonging in British Writing, 1840-1970 (Contributions to the Study of World Literature)

Lincolnshire Murders

Square Mile Bobbies: The City of London Police 1829-1949

Hanged at York

Hanged at Lincoln

Victoria's Spymasters: Empire and Espionage

More on the Word-Hoard: The Work of Seamus Heaney