Our Common Life
Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall
The words and music of folksongs’ artists and conservators
Cloth – $29.95
978-0-252-05986-5
eBook – $14.95
978-0-252-04926-2
Publication Date
Cloth: 09/01/2026
Series: Music in American Life
About the Book
“I can’t teach you, but I can show you.” With these words, Kentucky balladeer Doc Hopkins shared his musical knowledge with a willing student, summoning an independent streak deeply embedded in the American character. His words capture the informal creativity and colloquial practice that marks folk tradition as it extends from the countryside to the city and back again.Stephen Wade recounts creators and conservators like Doc Hopkins, many of them born in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. The figures include 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. As Will Keys, another of the musicians featured here, once told the author about his way of playing, it’s “AWYC, Any Way You Can.” These individuals and their stories demonstrate how folklore offers a way of understanding the world.
Thoughtfully written, filled with original research, and abundantly illustrated with both color and black and white photography, Our Common Life illuminates the truth that creative freedom within informal tradition, fundamental to the artists and their processes, speaks to a resourcefulness inscribed in the nation’s founding charter and expressed in its common life.
* Publication of this book was supported in part by grants from the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.
About the Author
Stephen Wade is musician, author, and a Grammy-nominated recording artist best known for his long running stage performances of Banjo Dancing and On the Way Home. He is the author of the award-winning book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience.Reviews
“Stephen Wade is not only a musical prodigy, he’s also a gifted writer, and one of our great chroniclers of American vernacular music. Part memoir, part biography, part history, Our Common Life is an affirmation of American musical creativity. But much more, in this age of billionaire creeps posing as populists and online hucksters monetizing hatred, Our Common Life evokes the real bedrock America, and it overflows with decency, imagination, and joy. Wade and his cast of characters are not just whistling in the dark; they’re whistling and singing and laughing and playing and carrying on. This is a wonderful book.”—Elliott Gorn, author of Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America
“Wade’s own experience as a musician informs every page of the book. First, he adeptly describes style and performance as the musicians themselves perceive their work, rather than through categories and abstraction. Second, Wade describes the physicality of music making—for example, how it feels to play fiddle for a rowdy dance crowd for hours on end. Finally, he is an accomplished interviewer, and this gift brilliantly carries over into allowing the musicians to express themselves in their own eloquent and poetic words.”
—Erika Brady, author of A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography
“Stephen uses an abundance of published media to reinforce his invaluable personal experiences interviewing tradition bearers and using them to demonstrate the role of music in both rural and urban traditional societies. As one vignette flows into another, Wade forges a long chain of interrelated mini documentaries within a clear and engaging narrative that’s sure to hold the reader’s attention.”
—Norm Cohen, author of Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong
Related Titles
