The Beautiful Music All Around Us

The Beautiful Music All Around Us
Author :
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Total Pages : 505
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780252094002
ISBN-13 : 025209400X
Rating : 4/5 (02 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Beautiful Music All Around Us by : Stephen Wade

Download or read book The Beautiful Music All Around Us written by Stephen Wade and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-08-10 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


The Beautiful Music All Around Us Related Books

The Beautiful Music All Around Us
Language: en
Pages: 505
Authors: Stephen Wade
Categories: Music
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-08-10 - Publisher: University of Illinois Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings betwee
The Circles All Around Us
Language: en
Pages: 34
Authors: Brad Montague
Categories: Juvenile Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-05-18 - Publisher: Penguin

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The debut picture book from the creator of the viral sensation Kid President is a moving take on how we can create bigger and bigger circles of community and co
Ideas Are All Around
Language: en
Pages: 53
Authors: Philip C. Stead
Categories: Juvenile Nonfiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-03 - Publisher: Macmillan

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In search of writing ideas, an author takes a walk with his dog around the neighborhood.
Everywhere and All Around
Language: en
Pages: 0
Authors: Pimm van Hest
Categories: Juvenile Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-06 - Publisher: Clavis

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Yolanda's mom has died. One moment she was breathing. And the next moment she wasn't. She was there, and yet she wasn't. Where could her mom be now? "if you loo
All Around Me
Language: en
Pages: 64
Authors: Shirley Hughes
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-11 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

View more details of this book at www.walkerbooks.com.au