Stephen Wade uncovers 'The Beautiful Music All Around Us' (CS Monitor)

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Stephen Wade uncovers 'The Beautiful Music All Around Us'
He's a folk music detective, revealing the lost artists who helped create American folk music.

By Mark Guarino, Staff writer / September 20, 2013



In October 1937, a fiddler from rural Kentucky recorded the instrumental song "Bonaparte's Retreat" for John and Alan Lomax, the father-and-son music collectors dispatched from the Library of Congress to capture American songs in the deepest, most marginalized pockets of the country.

The song they recorded traveled farther than they ever imagined: to the symphonic music stage via the Aaron Copeland composition "Rodeo"; to the FM airwaves courtesy of British progressive-rock group Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; and to film and television screens. Now it's piped in among us all in airports, coffee shops, and shopping malls.

The song, a humble fiddle tune, is so endearing it has become "the American voice," says Ron Penn, the director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

But who originally recorded it? At the time, it didn't matter, because the musicologists hunting for songs showed little interest in the performers. Unlike today, when songs are secondary to the cult of personality surrounding the performer, back then the songs were considered a higher priority because they were believed to have the power to twine together the disparate cultures of different regions. Who performed them, and why? The performer could have been anybody.

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Those factors drive "The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience" (University of Illinois), an 18-year project that has taken Mr. Wade deep into southern Appalachia, the Great Plains, and the Mississippi Delta. His hunt, which involved interviews with more than 200 people, produced intimate profiles of 13 singers, musicians, and groups heard on the Library of Congress field recordings made between 1934 and 1942 that today are considered the foundation of American song.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/2013/0920/Stephen-Wade-uncovers-The-Beautiful-Music-All-Around-Us