Stephen Wade’s Our Common Life: Folksong History

A review of Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall by Stephen Wade; 488 pages; University of Illinois Press (September 2026)

I.

Fans of traditional “old-time” music, American folklore, and folksong will be familiar with the life and work of Stephen Wade. Some will have seen—or at least heard about—his one-man play Banjo Dancing, which ran at the Arena Stage in Washington DC from 1981 to 1991. Then-president Jimmy Carter invited Wade to perform a lawn concert at the White House on Labor Day 1979, which was attended by 1,500 people. I am fortunate enough to have seen Banjo Dancing when Wade performed it off-Broadway in New York City. T.E. Kalem’s review in a 1979 issue of Time concluded with these words: “A wondrous artist, this Stephen Wade, who spills the heart’s blood of passion and truth in the tradition of Charles Aznavour, Nana Mouskouri, Django Reinhardt and Woody Guthrie. He may have surfaced in Chicago, but his potential fame defies augury.”

Wade is now widely thought to be the finest living non-bluegrass picker of the five-string banjo. But unlike other folk artists, he has travelled the country for years, seeking and recording any surviving old-time players he can find. His lifetime’s work has been to keep their music alive, playing the songs and retelling stories he has learned along the way. His first book, The Beautiful Music All Around Us, was published to rave reviews. The late Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout called that book a “masterpiece of humane scholarship.” The Chicago Tribune’s reviewer described the stories it contained as “compelling, moving and revelatory.”

With his new book, Wade has outdone his earlier effort. Our Common Life is part-history, part-autobiography, and it finds the author broadening his search for authentic homemade American music. He takes us on a trip through the United States, introducing us to the musicians he encounters and jams with. These include the original star of the Grand Ole Opry, five-string banjoist Uncle Dave Macon, whose showy persona made him an audience favourite. Pickers like Clarence Ashley who played with the down-picking “frailing” style, are discussed along with Dock Boggs (who used a three-finger up-picking style) and the first five-string-banjo bluegrass star, Earl Scruggs. Other musicians are guitar players, like the famous country and folk guitarist Doc Watson, whose annual festival still attracts thousands of attendees. Also featured are Chicago and Deep South blues guitarists and singers like Muddy Waters, Bukka White, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Josh White, whose polished voice made him a star in the 1940s and ’50s.

Since Wade is a master of the five-string banjo, it is not surprising that he devotes lengthy sections of the book to Uncle Dave Macon and Earl Scruggs. We learn that even in the days of segregation, many white banjo and guitar pickers learned carefully from black street musicians. Quoting a fellow writer, Tony Russell, Wade seconds his insight that the music they made “was neither black nor white, but a hundred shades of grey.” Wade notes that Uncle Dave Macon’s 1924 recording of “Skillet Good and Greasy” (covered by Pete Seeger on his 1950 album Darling Corey) was also the first song he performed at the Grand Ole Opry. It is, Wade writes, “a one-part reel, a structure not uncommon in Black folk practice, and apparent in banjo songs from the Jim Crow era.”

If Macon was the first star performer to adopt the frailing technique of the old-time banjo players, the new style of bluegrass banjo-picking was popularised by Earl Scruggs while he was playing banjo with Bill Monroe’s group. Some enthusiasts called this technique “banjo playing on steroids.” Wade describes Scruggs’s style as outlining “a given tune via a series of right-hand rolls and left-hand phrases that coordinated with the changing chords.” It exemplifies his contribution to bluegrass, most famously on his now-classic “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which Scruggs played alongside many professional banjo pickers he had influenced and mentored.

Wade also writes about the life, times, and influence of the legendary twelve-string guitar genius, Huddie Ledbetter, better known by his professional name, Lead Belly. It was Lead Belly who popularised some of America’s most cherished traditional songs, including “Rock Island Line,” which was covered by scores of singers including the Weavers and Harry Belafonte, and which became a British hit when it was released by skiffle star Lonnie Donegan. Many of Lead Belly’s other songs were made famous by those who covered them, including “The Midnight Special” (Creedence Clearwater Revival), “Goodnight Irene” (the Weavers, Frank Sinatra, Tom Waits), “Cotton Fields Back Home” (the Beach Boys, Johnny Cash), and “Black Girl,” also known as “In the Pines” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (a searing version by Nirvana, recorded in 1993 a few months before Kurt Cobain’s suicide).

Lead Belly sang “roustabout” songs that had been picked up by black labourers on the steamboats. Lead Belly knew “about this work and its demands” from personal experience, Wade explains, because the music expressed the life and times in which he lived. But his tastes were eclectic, and he moved beyond “field hollers, blues, ballads, spirituals” and “cowboy numbers” to “tin pan alley creations and game songs” sung by children. His second recorded album, a critic quoted by Wade remarked, displayed “a carefully selected cross-section of his talent.” Lead Belly considered all the songs he performed to be folk music, whether they were Broadway show tunes or songs he had learned from black prisoners and regular undiscovered Americans. Some of these songs were handed down from one generation to the next, and the Appalachian ballads had been brought to the United States by Scotch-Irish immigrants.

When traditional singers sought to master a tune they had heard, Wade calls it “Catching the Music,” the title of one of his chapters, and he reproduces an 1866 William Sidney Mount painting titled Catching the Tune by way of illustration. Years earlier, Mount’s brother had encountered a fiddle player surrounded by people who seemed to be waiting for the musician to play another song. “I think,” he wrote in a letter to his sibling, that it “would make a good picture.” Wade tells us that Mount himself played fiddle at country dances, and wrote down tunes he had learned from oral tradition. Catching, Wade explains, “is a core element of informal tradition.” And as Wade’s mentor, the late Fleming Brown, once told him, “A tune has recognizable contours yet becomes genuinely alive in the personal solutions brought by its practitioners.” Traditional music may have inspired Wade and scores of other folk artists, but each artist made the tune his own.

Perhaps the best definition of “old-time music” comes from Will Keys, an Appalachian banjo picker who received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1996 and was honoured at the State Department the same year by Jane Alexander, then chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. “If you needed something,” Keys said, “you either did without, or you’d build it yourself.” Not only did he play tunes passed down for generations by people from the Appalachian area, but he also played Methodist hymns, popular songs, movie scores, and old fiddle tunes. Bobby Fulcher, who nominated Keys for the award, observed that he never replicated the song he heard. “Each person is his own factory,” Fulcher explained. Pickers like Keys came from a pre-industrial tradition, where people did not mimic; they played the essence of what they heard. “You don’t need to sound like me,” Keys told a banjoist trying to learn and perform in his style. “You need to sound like you.”

II.

Turning to his native city of Chicago, Wade recalls the weekend market on Maxwell Street, which opened in 1912 and remained there until 1994, when it was relocated to Canal Street where it remains today. There, you might find Muddy Waters’s guitarist Jimmy Rogers, who once said that “with three or four guys you could make more money than you could in a club for a whole week.” According to the documentary Cheat You Fair, the famous blues musicians Little Walter and Junior Wells also played there. The great Muddy Waters sometimes played in front of the record store owned by Bernard Abrams, the Jewish businessman who recorded the major blues singers on his Ora Nelle Records label, named after Abrams’s wife.

Here, Wade illuminates the origins of what was later called the “folk revival,” or what blues singer Tracy Nelson called the “great folk scare.” The big-city audience started with release of a five-disc collection of 78s in 1941 titled Smoky Mountain Ballads, which included Uncle Dave Macon, Bill and Charlie Monroe, the Carter Family, and a Georgia group called Gid Tanner & His Skillet Lickers. The liner notes were written by John Lomax, the famous folk-music collector, who sought songs that reflected “the environment of freedom.” One critic described the album’s tracks as songs of “unquestionable authenticity.”

The earliest artist to find a mass audience for folk music was the Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, whose 1927 book The American Songbag could be found on the pianos of many Americans during that era. One of the songs Sandburg printed was called “The John B. Sails,” and it was given to him by a friend named John T. McCutcheon, who found it while he was vacationing in the Bahamas. It would be popularised by the Weavers during the 1950s under the name “(The Wreck of the) John B.,” and then turned into a bona fide pop hit under the name “Sloop John B.” by the Beach Boys in 1966. Later, a 1934 collection titled American Ballads and Folk Songs, curated by John Lomax and his son Alan, would serve as an introduction to the music the Lomaxes collected, much of which is now well-known.

An important song during this period was “The Death of Harry Simms,” which was co-written in 1932 by miner/singer Jim Garland and his half-sister and fellow activist Aunt Molly Jackson. It told the story of a twenty-year-old man (nineteen in the song) who was murdered earlier that year while he was organising miners in Kentucky. He was shot to death by “gun-thugs” hired by the mining companies to scare miners from joining coal-country unions. The song was first captured in a field recording of Aunt Molly Jackson by Alan Lomax and folklorist Mary Elizabeth Barnicle for the Library of Congress in 1935. In 1946, Barnicle transcribed the lyrics and sheet music for the People’s Songs Bulletin. Today, “The Death of Harry Simms” can be found on a 2006 collection titled Harlan County USA: Songs of the Coal Miner’s Struggle, and Wade argues that it has become part of what he calls “American vernacular music.”

However, Wade does not discuss the role of the American Communist Party in promoting this version of Americana in folk music. As a former Village Voice critic remarks in BBC4’s Folk America documentary, “The hidden truth is that without the Communist Party, there would have been no folk revival.” In 1957, Pete Seeger recorded a cover of “The Death of Harry Simms” on his American Industrial Ballads album, and it remained a part of his repertoire until the 1970s. But Seeger left out the last verse. This is how Seeger’s version ends: