‘The Beautiful Music All Around Us’

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In the 1930s and ’40s, the Library of Congress sent “song collectors” with bulky recording gear into rural America. Their mission was to document folk music traditions fading against the bright glare of mass media, especially from the coast-to-coast broadcasts and sound recordings that were connecting the nation like never before but also homogenizing its culture. Before then, local creativity could flourish in relative innocence of outside influences. Song collectors such as John and Alan Lomax set up recorders on front porches, in parlors and schoolhouses. The recordings eventually issued by the Library of Congress would inspire the folk-blues music movement that shaped Bob Dylan and other key figures in rock music during the ’60s.

Stephen Wade was part of that ’60s generation of musicians influenced by those Library of Congress recordings. In his book The Beautiful Music All Around Us, Wade closely examined 13 recordings from that vast project of cultural documentation, visiting the settings, finding descendants of the performers and detailing the stories behind “Rock Island Line” and other folk songs that found their way into the wider culture.

Wade has transformed the book into a one-man show, built around the blues, country and folk music covered in the text. Live, The Beautiful Music All Around Us includes spoken passages, projected images and, most of all, performances of the old songs that caught the beauty permeating everyday life and spilled from the mouths of everyday people.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us will be performed Jan. 16-March 15 at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stackner Cabaret, 108 E. Wells St. For tickets: milwaukeerep.com.