The Beautiful Music All around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

Abstract

The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience. By Stephen Wade. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Music in American Life Series. Pp. xvii + 477, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, music examples, notes, works cited, a note on the recording, index. 13-track CD included. $24.95 cloth.)Stephen Wade's The Beautiful Music All Around Us is a collection of musical histories that animates thirteen field recordings made for the Library of Congress between 1934 and 1942. These field recordings, collected by such folklorists as John and Alan Lomax, are included on the accompanying CD. Combining multisited ethnographic work, archival research, and oral histories from surviving musicians, family members, friends, and community members, Wade details his investigative process that led him to places such as Appalachia, Huntsville, and the Mississippi Delta in pursuit of the backstories of the recordings. He shares with readers the diverse life stories of the individual performers whose unique iterations of folk songs have shaped American musical culture, from the local to national level. The musicians (seven black and five white) featured in this book span a wide range of personalities and include a "charismatic" convict, Mississippi schoolchildren, housewives and mothers.The book is organized into twelve chapters that bear the names of "the twelve singers and instrumentalists," who, according to Wade, "show us the irrepressible admixture of music in America" (4). He notes, "Their stories are metaphors for how this country has lived" (4). Their stories, it seems, are metaphors for perseverance amidst adversity, often relying on creative methods of "getting by," such as using song as support, archive, and a performance of renewal. We hear these themes in the uncovering of often-silent histories of familiar songs, both as sonorous texts and cultural productions. While these stories resound the striking diversity and talent of the folk, Wade is careful to contextualize the songs within America's complex socio-economic milieu. He draws from the musical textures strands of concrete historical issues that find resonance today, such as slavery, racism, poverty, hunger, unsafe working conditions, and lack of access to education.In Chapter 3, for example, Wade explores the racial past of "Shortenin' Bread," performed by Ora Dell Graham and her classmates as a call and response style playground song in 1940. The song, known to many Americans as a nursery rhyme or lullaby, is posited to have its roots in blackface minstrelsy when performers would often mock the diets of slaves. While there is no historical documentation of this origin from the early nineteenth century, "Shortenin' Bread" audibly extends back to minstrelsy with lyrics in an exaggerated style of black vernacular that have become softened over time given commercial pressures. Wade traces the song's evolution as "community lore" and as "a commercial project" by connecting the piece to its namesake cuisine and the sustenance, which at times was scarce, it provided (91). The song has meant much to many people, and it has been a celebration of freedom as well as appropriated by a white theatrical composer who failed to credit his sources. Following the presentation of its backstory, Wade writes that Ora Dell Graham's bluesy rendition, "expresses a symbolic reversal, turning poverty into plenty . . . Ora Dell takes a plain but desired food, rooted in subsistence, and converts it into strength" (98-9). He then poignantly connects this functional musicality with other "ceremonials of the poor," such as the Pinkster celebrations, in which African Americans are freed from work and revel in eating, drinking, and enjoying games and music.Accounts that champion "the folk," rejoice in a pluralistic American society, or aggrandize the plight and victories of the working or underclasses are indeed prevalent in American scholarship and literature. …