Author, banjo player, and all-around string music entertainer Stephen Wade has a new book, Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall, which should be of interest to anyone with a passion for traditional folk music.
Stephen, who has been described as the most popular non-bluegrass banjo player in the world, won his reputation live on stage, starting out as a younger man with a frenetic performance style. His one-man show, Banjo Dancing, launched in 1979 in Chicago, where it caught the attention of theater critics who praised Wade for merging his clawhammer banjo playing, clog dancing, physical presence, and storytelling skills into a coherent stage show.
Banjo Dancing gradually moved into larger and larger halls, and eventually moved to Washington, DC where it ran successfully for ten years at the Arena Stage, making it among the longest-running off-Broadway shows in the US.
As a writer, his essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in multiple publications, and his 2019 book, The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, was well-received by critics.
Now Our Common Life, released last month by the University of Illinois Press, joins Wade’s catalog, presented as a cultural history of American folk music. The book exists as a series of interrelated biographies, essays, and case studies based on his original research, archival scholarship, and old-fashioned on-the-ground fieldwork.
Artists highlighted in the book include Doc Hopkins, who was Stephen’s mentor, Will Keys, Sid Harkreader, Kirk McGee, Ola Belle Reed, Jewel Fagan Haynes, Cordell and Olean Kemp, Bill Monroe, Helen Marie Rowe, Virgil and Mabel Anderson, Joe and Odell Thompson, John Jackson, Huddie Ledbetter, Uncle Dave Macon, Dorris Macon, Raeburn Flerlage, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Jim Schwall, Archie Green, Lloyd Lewis, Thaddeus Willingham, Jack Conroy, and Fleming Brown.
But it’s not just individuals who attract Wade’s attention. The history and “biographies” of songs are also traced, in what U of I Press calls “a love letter to American vernacular creativity—generous, curious, and alive to the ways music moves from enclaved communities to the wider society and back again.”
More than 60 quality photographs adorn the book’s 488 pages.
Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall is available online in cloth, paper, and ebook editions.
