The Beautiful Music All Around Us

[mjzee]

In the 1930s and early 1940s, the Library of Congress widened the net and recorded Creek Indian lullabies and cowboy ballads and a host of other fresh sounds, from sad Cajun accordion waltzes of the Louisiana bayous to the chanteys of windjammers at the San Francisco docks. Whether for work, play or worship, here was a thriving folk-song subculture.

Even so, when the Library of Congress issued its recordings in a landmark series, "Folk Music of the United States," the song texts remained the focus, exhaustively analyzed in the scholarly booklets that accompanied the albums, compiled by genre. For example: "Negro Blues and Hollers" or "Songs and Ballads of the Bituminous Miners." For the most part, the performers received scant mention.

These elusive folk musicians cast a spell on Stephen Wade, who has spent decades searching for traces of the people who left behind the sounds that wooed him a half-century ago. "The singers and players who fill this book," he writes in "The Beautiful Music All Around Us," "bring together lore and life, drawing from mother wit and the mood of the moment to create in their corners of America their own varieties of street-joy."

Full book review here:

WSJ