The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings & the American Experience

About

Stephen Wade presents a talk related to the research for his recent book, "The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience," which takes as its starting point 13 iconic performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and onto the Great Plains. Through decades of research and detective work, musician Stephen Wade tracked down surviving performers and their families, fellow musicians, and community members. Weaving together loving and expert profiles of these performers with the histories of these songs and tunes, Wade brings to life largely unheralded individuals -- farm laborers, state prisoners, school children, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners -- whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. 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.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Library of Congress, in Library of Congress: talks and concerts

Licence or status

Rights statement at the Library of Congress, as the Library of Congress states it.

Credit

Library of Congress

Language

English

Country

United States

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Tweens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed