TT: Born to sing unheard

My “Sightings” column in today’s Wall Street Journal is about The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, Stephen Wade’s important new book about some of the men and women who made the Library of Congress field recordings of American folk and vernacular music. Here’s an excerpt.
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The thousands of field recordings of American folk and vernacular music that were made by Alan Lomax and his colleagues rank high among the cultural treasures to be found in the Library of Congress. Some of them, like “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” have made their way into the collective consciousness of musicians and music lovers throughout the world. Next to nothing is known about most of the people who cut those rough-hewn recordings, nearly all of whom were amateurs or semi-professionals who made music purely for their own pleasure and that of their families and friends….
Enter Stephen Wade, a musician and folklorist who has long been fascinated by the Library of Congress field recordings. Following in Mr. Lomax’s footsteps, Mr. Wade went back into the field to track down the descendants of 12 of the near-forgotten musicians who recorded for the Library of Congress between 1934 and 1942. He has turned his findings into an extraordinary book called “The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience” that was published earlier this month by the University of Illinois Press. It’s a masterpiece of humane scholarship–but one that reads like a detective story. Working against the fast-ticking clock of mortality, Mr. Wade succeeded in documenting the lives and work of a dozen folk artists whose stories came perilously close to vanishing down the memory hole….
These men and women were exemplary figures to whose cultural significance Mr. Wade pays impassioned tribute in his introduction. “Their stories are metaphors for how this country has lived,” he writes. “One by one they show us what a single person can do in a democracy.”
As I read those words, I couldn’t help but think of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” the poem in which Thomas Gray memorialized the “mute inglorious Miltons” of the English countryside whose gifts were known only to their neighbors. “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/And waste its sweetness on the desert air,” he wrote. Were it not for Messrs. Lomax and Wade, most of the artists whose stories are told in “The Beautiful Music All Around Us” might just as easily have been born to sing unheard. Instead their voices live on, never to be forgotten….
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Read the whole thing here.
Stephen Wade talks about the writing of The Beautiful Music All Around Us:

Bill Stepp’s 1937 Library of Congress field recording of “Bonaparte’s Retreat”: