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The Sum of All Wisdom is built on a simple idea: music IS the sum of all wisdom.
More than a podcast, The Sum of All Wisdom is a community and resource platform dedicated to exploring music as a way of knowing. Music is humanity's oldest way of knowing and one of our best technologies for making meaning, and through long-form conversations with musicians, producers, writers, and cultural thinkers—along with performances, essays, and educational resources—we investigate the creative life and what it teaches us about memory, identity, creativity, community, and the human condition.
Whether you're a musician, artist, scholar, or simply someone who loves music and believes it matters, The Sum of All Wisdom is an invitation to listen more deeply: to great music, to the people who make it, and to the wisdom gained through a life devoted to music and musical worlds.
Because music is more than entertainment. It is one of humanity's most ancient ways of understanding the universe and our place in it.
[01:00:00:00 - 01:00:10:17]
(Music)
[01:00:10:17 - 01:00:22:07]
Scott Catey
I'm talking today with Stephen Wade about his new book, "Our Common Life," published by University of Illinois Press. Stephen is a renowned banjo player, guitarist,
[01:00:22:07 - 01:00:32:20]
Scott Catey
folklorist, and historian. You might recognize Steve from his previous book, "The Beautiful Music All Around Us," or from his many appearances and performances, or perhaps from
[01:00:32:20 - 01:00:41:10]
Scott Catey
his long-running one-man show, "Banjo Dancing." Stephen has produced or recorded more than a dozen albums, and his most recent records include
[01:00:41:10 - 01:00:45:14]
Scott Catey
"Across the Amerikee," released in 2017, and "Hands
[01:00:45:14 - 01:00:52:07]
Scott Catey
on the Tune" from 2023. Both are based on his extensive research into American traditional music and culture.
[01:00:52:07 - 01:01:03:00]
Scott Catey
Like "The Beautiful Music All Around Us," Steve's new book, "Our Common Life," is a deeply researched and very personal exploration of American folk song and the many ways it unites
[01:01:03:00 - 01:01:13:05]
Scott Catey
us, inspires us, and gives us hope to carry on. Stephen doesn't just chronicle our musical past. He assays musical tradition and musical creativity
[01:01:13:05 - 01:01:20:19]
Scott Catey
to illuminate our history and our understanding through finely tuned vignettes of lives lived, music
[01:01:20:19 - 01:01:32:22]
Scott Catey
made, and tradition both challenged and preserved. Steve's own experience as a musician informs the book very deeply, and his knowledge, humanity, and generosity are a gift to us all.
[01:01:34:00 - 01:01:35:03]
Scott Catey
If you've ever found yourself
[01:01:35:03 - 01:01:47:05]
Scott Catey
wondering about origins and evolution of musical styles, the bearers of folk tradition, or the instruments they bring to life, "Our Common Life" is for you, and Stephen Wade is the perfect guide.
[01:01:47:05 - 01:01:52:08]
Scott Catey
Are you ready, Steve?
Stephen Wade
Yeah. Oh, you've got Jerry Garcia's hand on your guitar.
[01:01:52:08 - 01:01:53:02]
Scott Catey
Yeah, I do.
[01:01:54:19 - 01:02:02:20]
Stephen Wade
I was his guest at the Old and in the Way concert at the boarding house in 1973. I was there, yeah.
[01:02:02:20 - 01:02:04:17]
Scott Catey
I met Vassar Clements once.
[01:02:04:17 - 01:02:06:00]
Stephen Wade
Oh, he's a great guy.
[01:02:06:00 - 01:02:07:20]
Scott Catey
Oh, I love him. He was wonderful.
[01:02:07:20 - 01:02:08:06]
Stephen Wade
Yeah.
[01:02:08:06 - 01:02:15:03]
Stephen Wade
Yeah, we once flew on a plane together, a long flight together. He is a beautiful guy and he was a great musician.
[01:02:16:18 - 01:02:24:01]
Stephen Wade
I first saw him in 1971 when he was playing at Passim's, which was in John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain.
[01:02:24:01 - 01:02:28:18]
Stephen Wade
He was a very nice guy. Yeah. Yeah. Kissimmee Kidd. He's the one from Florida.
[01:02:28:18 - 01:02:29:23]
Scott Catey
That's right. That's right.
[01:02:29:23 - 01:02:34:18]
Stephen Wade
Yeah. He was special. Harty adored him and his...
[01:02:36:14 - 01:02:42:09]
Stephen Wade
He adopted his fiddle style and told me he really wanted to play like Vassar. And
[01:02:44:04 - 01:03:14:17]
Stephen Wade
really that’s why Flying Fish was founded was based on what John said to Mike and to Bruce Kaplan, I mentioned to you earlier, my late roommate, said each of these guys has an album in them. So that was Tutt Taylor and that was Vassar and that was Norman Blake. And Flying Fish basically was founded around the idea that Bruce, who had been one of the founders of Rounder, would then have his own label and use his resources to create their albums. Oh, wow. And that's...
[01:03:16:01 - 01:03:18:12]
Stephen Wade
They're really the impulse behind it.
[01:03:18:12 - 01:03:19:05]
Scott Catey
So
[01:03:19:05 - 01:03:22:05]
Scott Catey
fascinating how it all comes together in those ways.
[01:03:23:21 - 01:03:28:14]
Scott Catey
So welcome to the podcast, Stephen. Thank you very much for agreeing to be on with me.
[01:03:28:14 - 01:03:31:20]
Stephen Wade
Oh, it didn't take much persuasion.
[01:03:31:20 - 01:03:50:00]
Scott Catey
If it's okay, I would love to start with a little bit about you. Sure. Where you come from and how you got into all of this and a little bit of a bio. As a sort of entree into the book, we'll end up talking about the book, Our Common Life,
[01:03:51:17 - 01:03:56:17]
Scott Catey
as we go. But I'd like to just get a... Sort of put some of the book in context, if you will.
[01:03:56:17 - 01:04:02:07]
Stephen Wade
I was born in Chicago and grew up in the city. And as a child, I was exposed,
[01:04:04:11 - 01:04:05:17]
Stephen Wade
fortunately, to
[01:04:06:19 - 01:04:07:03]
Stephen Wade
the
[01:04:08:03 - 01:04:26:09]
Stephen Wade
sidewalk culture that was around. And if you recall from my earlier book, The Beautiful Music All-Around, the first photograph in that book is of a man with a chicken on his head, Casey Jones. Casey Jones. The chicken man. Why, he used to perform with this chicken. He said he had trained 217 chickens and they're all named Mae West.
[01:04:28:04 - 01:05:05:16]
Stephen Wade
But Casey and Mae would perform in a corner near where I went to elementary school, so I saw him a lot. And I realized, you know, art was wherever you found it. I mean, this was theater of a wonderful sort. And even there's cops, you know, car horns blaring and buses lumbering past and, you know, traffic and pedestrians. There was this thing going on with him and this performance. And he was called Casey Jones. His real name was Anderson Punch. He was called Casey Jones because he played that song, Casey Jones, on his accordion. And he had a little squeeze box accordion that we wore.
[01:05:06:17 - 01:05:07:03]
Stephen Wade
So,
[01:05:08:17 - 01:05:16:15]
Stephen Wade
and he was a hero in Chicago. I mean, when he died it was front page of the Chicago Defender. And he,
[01:05:18:22 - 01:05:29:22]
Stephen Wade
people came down to it. He was in a funeral home that belonged to an alderman, Sammy Rainer, that they had to move him to a church. There's so many people who came to see him. He respects his beloved showman
[01:05:31:20 - 01:05:35:23]
Stephen Wade
for several days. He's buried in the same cemetery
[01:05:37:03 - 01:05:41:00]
Stephen Wade
where Emmett Till is found. So
[01:05:42:03 - 01:05:43:14]
Stephen Wade
I was exposed to people like Casey
[01:05:44:14 - 01:05:47:17]
Stephen Wade
Jones. I just really loved it. And so by
[01:05:49:11 - 01:06:05:02]
Stephen Wade
the time things like the Beatles came out in 1964, I just had to play the guitar. And I was very fortunate because my guitar teacher was Jim Schwall of the Siegel Schwall Blues Band. And Jim was just,
[01:06:06:06 - 01:06:09:14]
Stephen Wade
Jim and Corky, the Siegel Schwall, Corky Siegel, Jim Schwall,
[01:06:10:17 - 01:06:12:23]
Stephen Wade
were just graduating from college at the time
[01:06:14:01 - 01:06:33:14]
Stephen Wade
and just beginning to form their band. But they had formed their band. And so I got, he allowed me to hang out, even though I was a little kid he let me hang out and show me guitar stuff, blues stuff. And I got to meet and see a lot of people. Big Joe Williams, for instance, was the night watchman
[01:06:35:02 - 01:06:45:21]
Stephen Wade
for Bob Koester for Delmark Records. And I remember I walked into that record place, Jazz Record Mart it was called, and there was Big Joe Williams looking
[01:06:47:04 - 01:07:04:03]
Stephen Wade
glaring actually. They realized I wasn't a shoplifter and I was a little kid, everything was silent. But later in my life I would be playing one of his songs. And his first hit in 1935 was "Baby Please Don't Go." And I do a version of that called "Another Man Done Gone" that
[01:07:05:08 - 01:07:09:00]
Stephen Wade
Vera Hall recorded for Library of Congress in 1940 and I
[01:07:10:03 - 01:07:13:23]
Stephen Wade
set that to a guitar and do that song.
[01:07:15:18 - 01:07:16:00]
Stephen Wade
But
[01:07:17:03 - 01:07:29:15]
Stephen Wade
Big Joe played that song and recorded several times in different versions over the years. And then of course scores of other people have learned it from him, at least 60 or so recordings at minimum.
[01:07:31:12 - 01:07:35:01]
Stephen Wade
So there were people like that were present. So I was very lucky.
[01:07:35:01 - 01:07:37:09]
Stephen Wade
was just all these great singers
[01:07:38:14 - 01:07:41:10]
Stephen Wade
in Chicago that were singing in churches and stuff
[01:07:43:02 - 01:07:45:03]
Stephen Wade
that one could see. And
[01:07:46:03 - 01:07:48:03]
Stephen Wade
so I was just
[01:07:49:21 - 01:08:24:21]
Stephen Wade
fortunate to be exposed to these electric blues players like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf as a boy because they would play in these saloons and Jim Corky with the opening act and they'd have the door flung open for Sunday matinee or something or something. And I would stand outside and listen. I didn't understand obviously cultural references in a song like "Hoochie Coochie Man" but I could see the audience understood. And so I knew something was being communicated and so this was meaningful and
[01:08:26:07 - 01:08:34:22]
Stephen Wade
touched me very much. And so that's my beginning. And music was that. I came to the banjo.
[01:08:35:23 - 01:08:39:00]
Stephen Wade
I'd heard the banjo early, the old fashioned banjo early
[01:08:42:14 - 01:08:49:00]
Stephen Wade
on the radio and loved it, the Scruggs style banjo that was being played. And
[01:08:50:06 - 01:08:57:06]
Stephen Wade
it took a while to figure out what that was because my dad had some records but they were plectrum banjo records. And I knew
[01:08:58:08 - 01:09:10:16]
Stephen Wade
that wasn't the same thing as ever it was that was being played on the banjo that was on the radio. And we didn't realize my dad, who was always encouraging me to be a musician,
[01:09:13:01 - 01:09:17:09]
Stephen Wade
didn't know there was a plectrum banjo versus a plectrum banjo versus a tenor banjo.
[01:09:18:10 - 01:09:24:05]
Stephen Wade
It was just a banjo but that doesn't sound right. So eventually we got that sorted out.
[01:09:25:07 - 01:09:29:06]
Scott Catey
Sort that out for us. What's the difference between these styles of banjo?
[01:09:29:06 - 01:09:42:01]
Stephen Wade
Well the number of strings for one thing. So the five string banjo has got this short drone string up here and neither the plectrum banjo, which has the same length fingerboard, has a regular manufactured banjo like
[01:09:43:02 - 01:10:26:02]
Stephen Wade
this, or the tenor which is shorter in neck, wouldn't have this. So these became the loudest stringed rhythmic instruments in an orchestra prior to electrification, prior to guitars being electrified. So when you get Charlie Christian plugging in and playing electric guitar in “Flying Home” with Benny Goodman, this is an early electric guitar solo, but you couldn't have heard the guitar very much before then. That's why they developed the F-hole guitar with the arch top to make it a louder instrument. Prior to that you would just have the round hole instrument of the 19th century and even in Benjamin Franklin's time earlier than that. So
[01:10:27:14 - 01:10:46:23]
Stephen Wade
the banjo, the fifth string becomes vestigial essentially come the tango era. And with the tango dance, this goes away. People are playing chords, playing passing chords for the guitar and for the banjo. And this
[01:10:48:09 - 01:11:01:11]
Stephen Wade
goes away except in southern enclaves. And that's where it stays. And sort of emblematic of those southern enclaves is an instrument like this, which is a fretless banjo. It's all wood
[01:11:02:17 - 01:11:02:23]
Stephen Wade
with
[01:11:04:00 - 01:11:19:04]
Stephen Wade
anodized steel holding into the possum skin or raccoon skin head type thing. This is made in western North Carolina. And there's a tradition of this design in this particular Watauga County, North Carolina. And
[01:11:21:00 - 01:11:21:14]
Stephen Wade
so this is
[01:11:22:16 - 01:11:45:09]
Stephen Wade
however, there's even older design banjos. In a countless, travelers accounts in the 18th century, the banjo is described as having a low grumbling sound. And they were gourd banjos. Their body was made out of a gourd. And on top of it, cut off like a pumpkin, you cut it off and just have that gourd, put its skin over it, tighten it
[01:11:46:19 - 01:11:54:12]
Stephen Wade
by letting it dry, the drying out would tighten it. And use like essentially carpet tacks of some sort to tack it in.
[01:11:55:13 - 01:12:09:07]
Stephen Wade
And those are the earliest banjos and reports of banjos with that low grumbling sound. And descriptions of written like hands of the handsaw, the hand being likened to a handsaw. And the
[01:12:10:10 - 01:12:27:15]
Stephen Wade
actual disposition of the hand on the banjo looks like that. So you get this claw hammer or knocking and different names for this downward motion that the banjo has played in early reports of the banjo. By the mid 19th century you have
[01:12:28:16 - 01:12:44:14]
Stephen Wade
developed what they're calling guitar style in the banjo primers, which is a finger style that we're more used to seeing through persons like Earl Scruggs who was so, exerted such powerful influence from the time he recorded 1946 on
[01:12:45:15 - 01:12:56:07]
Stephen Wade
and became a folk tradition of its own in his style. And his is based on earlier finger style. So it's developed in the
[01:12:57:17 - 01:13:04:15]
Stephen Wade
late 19th century ragtime music is coming up and ragtime banjo, five string, very virtuosic
[01:13:06:12 - 01:13:16:16]
Stephen Wade
performances follow. And early recordings, because recording technology was very favorable to recordings of the banjo, they
[01:13:18:01 - 01:13:34:03]
Stephen Wade
could hear it on these early cylinder recordings. So there's a lot of documentation of it in audio media and audible media of the ragtime playing. And so that's where the five string banjo is continuing there.
[01:13:35:20 - 01:13:56:02]
Stephen Wade
And that's sort of outside the tango banjo and that kind of dancing that emerges. These different dance phases are affecting what's being played and physically affecting the design and developments on the instrument just as much as electric guitars are reflecting technologies and
[01:13:58:01 - 01:14:11:18]
Stephen Wade
musical styles of the present day. As has successive keyboards adapted to, so these things are going hand in hand, and technology and the music and the dance styles, social dance is
[01:14:12:21 - 01:14:20:07]
Stephen Wade
critically important because that's where people are getting themselves involved in an immediate sense of the music.
[01:14:20:07 - 01:14:24:09]
Scott Catey
One of the things we'll come to as we talk about your book,
[01:14:25:12 - 01:14:37:11]
Scott Catey
it stays with me. The way you frame it is there's a lot of people in a song, in a tune. And also each tune has, I mean it basically encapsulates institutions and histories.
[01:14:37:11 - 01:14:43:16]
Stephen Wade
Well common possessions with individual contributions. So someone takes a song like "Big Joe Williams'
[01:14:45:22 - 01:14:47:05]
Stephen Wade
Baby Please Don't Go" and
[01:14:48:09 - 01:14:49:14]
Stephen Wade
brings their own to it.
[01:14:51:02 - 01:14:54:06]
Stephen Wade
The idea that it's only uniform once there's a
[01:14:55:17 - 01:15:08:17]
Stephen Wade
phonographic recording isn't necessarily what follows. Because people will take a song and sing it within their own style if they learned it from that source. A lot of the music of course that I'm involved with was
[01:15:10:09 - 01:15:14:18]
Stephen Wade
person to person. And so there's inevitably variation that way.
[01:15:16:06 - 01:15:17:02]
Stephen Wade
But these tunes,
[01:15:18:11 - 01:15:20:18]
Stephen Wade
in talking about a tune that's many people in it,
[01:15:24:12 - 01:15:28:18]
Stephen Wade
how many people, countless numbers of people have recorded "Soldier's Joy" and
[01:15:29:23 - 01:15:33:03]
Stephen Wade
there's so many versions that stem from it. Yeah.
[01:15:33:03 - 01:15:42:03]
Scott Catey
I'm thinking especially just at the moment you said that guy Clark and his rendition just is beautiful.
Stephen Wade
Oh I'd like to hear it.
Scott Catey
Yeah he's good. Yeah I don't know. Very good.
[01:15:43:10 - 01:15:56:10]
Scott Catey
So Stephen, sorry, we went a little bit off of where you were going with your bio. So back to you and your father trying to figure out from listening to the radio what banjo type you were hearing.
[01:15:56:10 - 01:16:12:08]
Stephen Wade
I knew that I was hearing something different than my dad's steamboat round the bend records. That's all. And I remember saying, I guess I was early then, I don't know, I just remember saying to him early on that's not the same thing.
[01:16:13:08 - 01:16:15:07]
Stephen Wade
And he didn't know. He
[01:16:16:16 - 01:16:18:13]
Stephen Wade
wasn't raised in that tradition.
[01:16:19:13 - 01:16:33:19]
Stephen Wade
His mother, my grandmother played pump organ by ear but it was from northern music you know and it wasn't the same thing. And she was in Philadelphia area.
[01:16:35:02 - 01:16:35:04]
Stephen Wade
And
[01:16:37:07 - 01:16:40:14]
Stephen Wade
I can't tell you much about that. I mean
[01:16:42:11 - 01:16:43:11]
Stephen Wade
I'll tell you this,
[01:16:45:14 - 01:16:49:18]
Stephen Wade
my great uncle who was a sculptor, public sculptor,
[01:16:51:02 - 01:16:54:04]
Stephen Wade
he and my great aunt, my great aunt was a professional singer.
[01:16:56:02 - 01:16:57:12]
Stephen Wade
They were on the Titanic.
[01:16:57:12 - 01:16:58:13]
Scott Catey
Oh my.
[01:16:58:13 - 01:17:06:09]
Stephen Wade
And he died. His body was recovered the next day because he had a life jacket on. But she got to live because she was one of the, she was putting her lifeboat.
[01:17:07:23 - 01:17:10:01]
Stephen Wade
And she sang on the Titanic
[01:17:11:04 - 01:17:35:18]
Stephen Wade
with the band the night it sank. I mean this thing is, I mean every Titanic song which is the most widely recorded and diversified by Ballad, there are many versions of songs about the singing of the Titanic next week. Well they all refer to singing "Nearer My God to Thee" or something like that on the band on board. Well that's not what the song she apparently sang that night. But she did sing that night
[01:17:36:18 - 01:17:44:20]
Stephen Wade
with one of the orchestras on that boat. Because she kept singing. Because I know she later got a medal from the King of Belgium for her singing
[01:17:45:22 - 01:17:46:14]
Stephen Wade
to the troops.
[01:17:47:19 - 01:18:01:13]
Stephen Wade
So there's that kind of, there's a little bit of music in my family and it's sort of, I only recently learned this about my family. But at any rate there was that presence there. And it's just, when I do the Titanic song
[01:18:02:19 - 01:18:21:06]
Stephen Wade
or the version I learned from Doc Hopkins, I can't help but think of that, like I said it's only recently that I've come into awareness of this family connection. Just astonishing really because it's such a huge everybody in the world. Everybody. Everybody in the industry in the world certainly knows it's about the Titanic going down.
[01:18:21:06 - 01:18:30:19]
Scott Catey
When you learn this, Stephen, when somebody tells you your great aunt was on the Titanic and sang as it was going down, how does that land on you?
[01:18:31:20 - 01:19:11:10]
Stephen Wade
Well with I guess astonishment and admiration both. I don't know. I did read some reviews of her when she was in England. My great uncle had come from Montreal back to England to pick her up to bring her back to Montreal and they were supposed to take the Lusitania but that was, they put that into port which really had its own history. So the ship becoming transferred them up to take the Titanic. I mean these accidents of history that occur. I think astonishment would be the answer at this point. I don't have a better word for it. I'm still reckoning with it.
[01:19:11:10 - 01:19:18:05]
Scott Catey
I expect, yeah. That's an incredible story. And to learn that sort of late in life. Late in life. That's amazing.
[01:19:18:05 - 01:19:32:14]
Stephen Wade
Well I know a lot more about families that I've studied for my work in music than I know about my own. So it's a little disgraceful. I don't know anything about my own family.
[01:19:34:18 - 01:19:36:23]
Stephen Wade
This is what I have recently.
[01:19:36:23 - 01:19:44:13]
Scott Catey
That might be a theme, our common life theme also, right? Is that we know more about other people than we do about our own families sometimes.
[01:19:44:13 - 01:19:45:19]
Stephen Wade
That might be. It's certainly true.
[01:19:45:19 - 01:20:01:12]
Scott Catey
I think I have that same experience as an ethnographer. That was my training in college. And I've worked in a number of places as an ethnographer. I know a lot of stuff about a lot of people and families more than I know about my own. So I sympathize when you say that.
[01:20:01:12 - 01:20:02:09]
Stephen Wade
There you go brother.
[01:20:03:09 - 01:20:03:21]
Scott Catey
So
[01:20:05:01 - 01:20:15:14]
Scott Catey
you started with the guitar. You're hearing differences with the banjo on radio and from what your father's introduced you to. Tell me when does the banjo come into your life?
[01:20:15:14 - 01:20:18:00]
Stephen Wade
I started playing the banjo when I was a teen.
[01:20:22:00 - 01:20:23:11]
Stephen Wade
What happened was,
[01:20:24:18 - 01:20:26:00]
Stephen Wade
so I got,
[01:20:28:16 - 01:20:31:12]
Stephen Wade
after around the time I got the banjo I
[01:20:32:17 - 01:20:47:17]
Stephen Wade
encountered Pete Seeger's famous primer, "How to Play the Five-String Banjo." And on the front page is a special acknowledgement thanks to the artist and banjo picker Chicago’s Fleming Brown who had done some of the illustrations. And if you look in here,
[01:20:48:19 - 01:20:54:08]
Stephen Wade
let me grab it. I'll show you the picture that one of the pictures Fleming drew.
[01:20:55:09 - 01:20:59:13]
Stephen Wade
So it said, "Thanks to it." This is one of the drawings
[01:21:00:20 - 01:21:01:14]
Stephen Wade
that appeared
[01:21:03:02 - 01:21:24:22]
Stephen Wade
in Pete Seeger's book. And Fleming Brown, WFB, the little initials on the side by the boy's leg is right there where he signed it. So what happened is, is that Fleming illustrated Pete's book, or some of the illustrations, some of the hand diagrams and this drawing that's at the very end of the book, at the closing of the book. So it's a significant
[01:21:26:05 - 01:21:38:18]
Stephen Wade
piece of visual artistry. Well I wonder who is this Fleming Brown of Chicago? I don't know. I walked over to the Old Town School of Folk Music, which wasn't far from where I grew up,
[01:21:39:19 - 01:21:50:00]
Stephen Wade
and I walked in there and I asked the lady behind desk, her name was Evelyn Brightman, and I said, "Well do you happen to know of someone named Fleming Brown?" She said, "Yeah, he's teaching here tomorrow night."
[01:21:51:20 - 01:21:56:20]
Stephen Wade
I said, "Is he good?" She said, "Why yes?" And then I said, "The stupidest thing." I said,
[01:21:57:20 - 01:22:13:08]
Stephen Wade
"Well how many banjos does he have?" She said, "Fifteen." I said, "Sign me up." So I knew he was serious. The thing is, in 1948, Pete Seeger was traveling around with the Henry Wallace presidential campaign.
[01:22:14:11 - 01:22:25:14]
Stephen Wade
At that point he had written his first version of this manual. It was 30 some pages, mimeographed with a staple in the left hand corner. No illustrations.
[01:22:27:05 - 01:22:32:00]
Stephen Wade
Fleming was at a party with Pete Seeger after one of these Henry Wallace
[01:22:33:07 - 01:22:34:13]
Stephen Wade
campaign appearances.
[01:22:35:15 - 01:22:54:10]
Stephen Wade
He had started playing the banjo, but he was lost. He said, "Can you recommend someone to teach me?" He said, "Yeah, try Doc Hopkins over at WLS." Doc Hopkins was a Kentucky banjo player and guitar player and singer on the National Barn Dance, which preceded the Grand Ole Opry. So
[01:22:55:14 - 01:22:57:08]
Stephen Wade
Fleming called Doc
[01:22:58:11 - 01:23:02:03]
Stephen Wade
and Doc said, "Well I can't teach you, but I can show you.
[01:23:05:05 - 01:23:14:02]
Stephen Wade
Come around five." And Fleming said, "No, make it five." I said, "I'll get off work at five." He said, "No, no, no, five in the morning. That's when I do my wake up show."
[01:23:15:05 - 01:23:25:03]
Stephen Wade
So Fleming would come down to the 8th Street Theater in Chicago and take lessons from Doc three times a week over coffee and rolls, and Doc would show them stuff, songs to play on the banjo.
[01:23:26:12 - 01:23:29:13]
Scott Catey
WLS is iconic radio.
[01:23:29:13 - 01:23:55:23]
Stephen Wade
World's largest store. Sears Roebuck owned it. They reached the Prairie Farmers and they were the voice of the Midwest. The fellow who was the emcee on that show, George D. Hay, then becomes the solemn old judge and he goes down to Nashville to become the emcee of the Grand Ole Opry. But National Barn Dance is actually going prior to the Opry, which is the longest running radio show in the United States.
[01:23:57:15 - 01:23:59:18]
Stephen Wade
And the
[01:24:00:18 - 01:24:09:01]
Stephen Wade
reach of the National Barn Dance was enormous. And on a given skip waves and weather, you could hear it for thousands of miles.
[01:24:10:06 - 01:24:16:14]
Stephen Wade
Certainly throughout the Midwest. And Doc was one of the persons who began on that show in 1930.
[01:24:17:15 - 01:24:42:07]
Stephen Wade
And I describe in one of the chapters in the book how it all happened because he was in a one room, attended a one room school in Brodhead, Kentucky, along with Carl Davis, whose father was the principal of that one room school, and a fellow named Hartford, Connecticut Taylor, Hardee Taylor. And they went to Red Bud School, school house.
[01:24:43:12 - 01:25:06:09]
Stephen Wade
Preceding them by a couple years was a man by the name of John Lair. And John Lair, who came up to Chicago to work at the YMCA and stuff, became part of the National Barn Dance, part of the radio show as an emcee and kind of a manager. And so he knew his younger schoolmates, Doc and Hardee Taylor and Carl Davis,
[01:25:07:19 - 01:25:19:17]
Stephen Wade
who were playing together and invited them up to Chicago. And that's how Doc got to Chicago through their classmate John Lair, who was an important promoter of this music in his tongue,
[01:25:21:09 - 01:25:28:16]
Stephen Wade
with an enormous impact. He developed a group called the Coon Creek Girls, an all-girls string band, all women's string band
[01:25:30:02 - 01:25:32:22]
Stephen Wade
of the Lilly Mae Ledford. And
[01:25:34:04 - 01:25:34:17]
Stephen Wade
so
[01:25:36:15 - 01:25:53:01]
Stephen Wade
Doc is teaching Fleming. Fleming is thanking Pete Seeger saying, "For turning me on to Doc Hopkins, I'll illustrate your book." And from the second edition on Fleming's drawings, such as you saw there appear in that primer since then. So that's how I got to
[01:25:54:03 - 01:25:59:08]
Stephen Wade
meet Fleming, because when I saw him that next night at the old town school,
[01:26:00:12 - 01:26:01:15]
Stephen Wade
he was overpowering.
[01:26:03:08 - 01:26:13:10]
Stephen Wade
He had a huge voice and a great sounding banjo, just filled every crevice of that room. His cowboy boot cracked on the floor and it just was
[01:26:15:08 - 01:26:18:02]
Stephen Wade
flooded through us, and certainly
[01:26:20:08 - 01:26:33:10]
Stephen Wade
And then- MR. I got that same year,
[01:26:36:01 - 01:26:37:16]
Stephen Wade
my best friend Freddie
[01:26:38:20 - 01:26:44:20]
Stephen Wade
attended a performance that Doc Hopkins was giving at a coffee house in Chicago. Doc was
[01:26:46:05 - 01:26:47:06]
Stephen Wade
seventy-two then.
[01:26:49:17 - 01:26:50:23]
Stephen Wade
And
[01:26:53:01 - 01:26:58:03]
Stephen Wade
Freddie was familiar with Fleming's biography by then from me, and
[01:26:59:15 - 01:27:04:15]
Stephen Wade
said, "You're the man I taught, Fleming Brown." He said, "That's right." And then Freddie,
[01:27:06:00 - 01:27:09:19]
Stephen Wade
who was still in school, becoming kind of a booking agent,
[01:27:11:02 - 01:27:19:12]
Stephen Wade
booked Doc at a coffee house where I, and that's when he introduced the two of us. And I started playing with Doc from that time on to the end of his life.
[01:27:20:13 - 01:27:27:15]
Stephen Wade
When he died nearly at age 88 in 1988 he passed away. He was born in 1900.
[01:27:28:20 - 01:27:29:04]
Stephen Wade
So
[01:27:30:07 - 01:27:40:09]
Stephen Wade
I got to have Fleming's teacher, plus Fleming, and Doc's teacher, or one of his teachers, was Dick Burnett.
[01:27:41:15 - 01:27:44:23]
Stephen Wade
Burnett and Rutherford. And Dick Burnett lived
[01:27:46:07 - 01:27:46:14]
Stephen Wade
in
[01:27:48:11 - 01:27:49:19]
Stephen Wade
Monticello, Kentucky.
[01:27:51:15 - 01:27:53:09]
Stephen Wade
And his
[01:27:54:13 - 01:27:58:14]
Stephen Wade
first hit was "Lost John," a version of "Lost John."
[01:28:00:15 - 01:28:10:18]
Stephen Wade
But his most famous song attributed to him is "Man of Constant Sorrow." It wasn't actually the title that he had. He had a little song book.
[01:28:10:18 - 01:28:12:11]
Stephen Wade
before he ever recorded,
[01:28:12:11 - 01:28:27:00]
Stephen Wade
He was blinded in a robbery. He was shot in the eyes. He was an oil rig worker in Kentucky. And then he was damaged. To make a living he became a full-time musician.
[01:28:27:00 - 01:28:29:01]
Stephen Wade
sold a song book.
[01:28:29:01 - 01:28:30:04]
Stephen Wade
1913.
[01:28:30:04 - 01:28:33:15]
Stephen Wade
That's the front cover. And he'd sell that at his shows.
[01:28:35:01 - 01:28:49:16]
Stephen Wade
And on the next page was the song that was the "Man of Constant Sorrow." Dick Burnett never recorded "Man of Constant Sorrow." But he taught it to a fellow Kentucky named Emry Arthur. And
[01:28:53:23 - 01:28:58:20]
Stephen Wade
Emry Arthur did record it. And it's from now that the Stanley Brothers learned the song.
[01:28:59:22 - 01:29:09:13]
Stephen Wade
And then "Man of Constant Sorrow" becomes the sort of theme song of the "Oh Brother" movie that is lip-synced by George Clooney and sung by Dan Tyminski's voice.
[01:29:09:13 - 01:29:14:15]
Scott Catey
Dan Tyminski, also a fantastic artist. Wonderful. Love that guy.
[01:29:14:15 - 01:29:18:11]
Stephen Wade
Yeah, it's great. So that's how that goes.
[01:29:18:11 - 01:29:26:19]
Stephen Wade
was an extraordinarily wonderful, diverse musician. He sang, he played multiple instruments. And I got to know
[01:29:28:12 - 01:29:30:05]
Stephen Wade
and visited a number of times.
[01:29:31:17 - 01:29:35:19]
Stephen Wade
Burnett and Rutherford had inheritors in that community, in that same community.
[01:29:36:21 - 01:29:38:13]
Stephen Wade
W.L. Gregory and
[01:29:40:05 - 01:29:45:20]
Stephen Wade
the Fiddler, Clyde Davenport. And I got to know Clyde and
[01:29:47:00 - 01:29:52:07]
Stephen Wade
visit him. And he was a wonderful, extraordinary Fiddler. Enormously
[01:29:53:22 - 01:29:59:00]
Stephen Wade
individualistic style and a large repertory. And
[01:30:00:02 - 01:30:13:19]
Stephen Wade
so that continuity of that music stayed within there in that community and was shared. Clyde was welcoming to visitors and was this enormous source of music.
[01:30:15:00 - 01:30:19:09]
Stephen Wade
He appears in this book briefly in a different chapter.
[01:30:20:11 - 01:30:20:22]
Scott Catey
So you're in
[01:30:22:01 - 01:30:26:00]
Scott Catey
a lineage, a musical lineage that goes well into the nineteenth
[01:30:26:00 - 01:30:47:06]
Stephen Wade
century. And musical transmission, I guess if you use academic kind of words. Yeah, there was. There was Dick Burnett, Doc Hopkins, to Fleming Brown, to me.
Scott Catey
And then Doc Hopkins directly to you.
Stephen Wade
Yes. So all of that was really there in my life and I shaped it all my days.
[01:30:47:06 - 01:31:03:08]
Scott Catey
And it's Chicago and the Midwest in large part. It's all of America that you're dealing with in the book. But Chicago and the Midwest is really sort of important in the way Chicago draws people in, but also the way other parts of the world draw people out.
[01:31:03:08 - 01:31:15:21]
Stephen Wade
Well that's right. I mean, you have this sort of anchor point and dissemination point. Chicago is this crossroads in America for export as well as import. It's exporting the blues. It's importing
[01:31:17:11 - 01:31:20:08]
Stephen Wade
through immigration people from Mississippi and Arkansas.
[01:31:21:12 - 01:31:30:19]
Stephen Wade
Black musicians who lived on the south side of Chicago during the Great Migration and then that includes people like Muddy Waters and all those artists on Chess Records.
[01:31:32:01 - 01:31:35:17]
Stephen Wade
And then you have people from Kentucky, like Doc Hopkins,
[01:31:36:20 - 01:31:43:08]
Stephen Wade
who comes to Chicago to play along with Carl Davis, who I got to know too. When I met Carl Davis,
[01:31:44:14 - 01:31:51:17]
Stephen Wade
he had one of the rarest jobs in America. He was still at WLS. He was a record turner.
[01:31:52:18 - 01:31:55:12]
Stephen Wade
He put the record on the, yeah.
[01:31:57:03 - 01:31:57:12]
Stephen Wade
Talk about it.
[01:31:57:12 - 01:31:58:16]
Scott Catey
That requires discipline.
[01:31:58:16 - 01:32:04:11]
Stephen Wade
Well, he put it on for the DJs. He'd get it on the turntables and get it all.
[01:32:06:16 - 01:32:08:04]
Stephen Wade
He did that to the end of his life.
[01:32:08:04 - 01:32:16:05]
Scott Catey
I was in radio for about almost 20 years. You know what I'm talking about. I do. We started with turntables. I don't know how old I am.
[01:32:17:21 - 01:32:23:22]
Scott Catey
But I would give my eye teeth to go back to that and turnin’ discs on the radio.
Stephen Wade
There you go. That was good.
[01:32:25:10 - 01:32:27:16]
Scott Catey
Not to get off of the topic.
Stephen Wade
No, go right ahead.
[01:32:27:16 - 01:32:47:05]
Scott Catey
Folk music is sort of where you're coming from, but it's more than that. Folk music is a category. It's a genre in a sense. But there's a much broader idea of mountain music and immigrant songs that are transformed into something that becomes American.
[01:32:48:11 - 01:32:52:03]
Scott Catey
And there's a sense of pre-bluesness to a lot of what you're talking about in this book.
[01:32:52:03 - 01:33:03:20]
Stephen Wade
Pre-blues exerts a major presence because that's really where the banjo and fiddle and that music sort of evolves and locates and it's certainly cross-cultural. This is a book about
[01:33:05:11 - 01:33:15:22]
Stephen Wade
cultural sharing, what you're talking about, but also cultural distinctiveness. And both can go hand in hand. So black banjo,
[01:33:18:16 - 01:33:30:00]
Stephen Wade
fiddle tunes that may come from the British Isles, the sharing of that music which is clearly in action in the 18th century. This is going on. One of the chapters in the book
[01:33:31:03 - 01:33:38:12]
Stephen Wade
is called "Catching the Music." And I'm talking about the learning of this music and Catching the tune, right?
[01:33:39:20 - 01:33:42:05]
Stephen Wade
Yeah. Well "Catching the Tune" is the painting that
[01:33:44:07 - 01:33:45:04]
Stephen Wade
William Sidney Mount
[01:33:45:04 - 01:34:32:15]
Stephen Wade
because Mount wasn't just a painter, he was a fiddler and he designed, he patented that fiddle that's Oh did he really? Yeah, that's depicted there. That's his unusual it's actually slightly, if you look at it, it's actually slightly unusual looking fiddle. Yeah, he had a patent on it. So he's involved in this music in a lot of ways. He left manuscript books of tunes he wrote. And his brother had said, you know, one scene you see all the time, he's saying to his brother, you might consider painting, he says, almost hackneyed. He said, is someone tapping out a tune to somebody and learning it by ear. And that stayed in Mount's head. And this is one of his last paintings, that painting. And there it is. He's
[01:34:32:15 - 01:34:35:13]
Stephen Wade
capturing it in paint, capturing it.
[01:34:35:13 - 01:34:46:02]
Stephen Wade
so that's already a cross-cultural story that's going on. Because he credits an ex-slave who was in his family,
[01:34:47:12 - 01:34:49:15]
Stephen Wade
who he's learning music from.
[01:34:51:08 - 01:34:52:23]
Scott Catey
The banjo originated in Africa.
[01:34:52:23 - 01:34:58:12]
Stephen Wade
Yes, yes, yes. It's brought here via slavery. It comes up through
[01:34:59:20 - 01:35:04:00]
Stephen Wade
the Caribbean, through the Dutch slavers of ships.
[01:35:05:02 - 01:35:13:16]
Stephen Wade
Caribbean sugar trade comes up in the United States. Earliest reports of banjo presence, as scholars have found,
[01:35:15:12 - 01:35:22:08]
Stephen Wade
banjo sightings are of preponderance which are from Maryland, in the tobacco field.
[01:35:23:17 - 01:35:45:10]
Stephen Wade
Because tobacco is going before cotton is in the deep south. So that's going on here. Earliest reports of banjos, there's a report of banjo, of what we consider a five-string banjo, even if it had three strings on it. But this kind of banjo and this kind of music, as far north as New York City, in the 18th century.
[01:35:46:17 - 01:35:54:03]
Stephen Wade
So it's present. And there are still earlier reports of the banjo, I think, in the settlement of 1600, very early
[01:35:55:05 - 01:35:55:22]
Stephen Wade
immigration.
[01:35:57:09 - 01:35:57:22]
Stephen Wade
So
[01:35:58:23 - 01:36:03:19]
Stephen Wade
it's here, it's in North America and the United States, certainly
[01:36:05:02 - 01:36:06:05]
Stephen Wade
in the 18th century.
[01:36:08:21 - 01:36:23:14]
Stephen Wade
And then it gets shared. It's shared. People are learning. People are watching each other. Segregation is not keeping the minds apart and aspirations of people wanting to play music. And so
[01:36:24:15 - 01:36:28:13]
Stephen Wade
it winds up in the mountains of Southern Appalachia, for instance.
[01:36:29:17 - 01:36:32:08]
Scott Catey
And these very early banjos were gourd style?
[01:36:32:08 - 01:36:36:07]
Stephen Wade
Yes, I should have brought one today. I didn't know we were going to talk about that.
[01:36:38:02 - 01:36:40:22]
Stephen Wade
I have one. In
[01:36:42:17 - 01:36:49:13]
Stephen Wade
the last chapter of the book, I mentioned the person I bought it from. His name was Scott Didlake. And he,
[01:36:49:13 - 01:37:08:10]
Stephen Wade
he was from Mississippi. Crystal Springs, Mississippi. And he decided to make banjos, gourd banjos. He had read, there had been an article in 1976 in the Journal of Ethnomusicology by a wonderful, wonderful woman. Her name was Dena Epstein. And then she wrote a book in 1987, the same series as this book,
[01:37:09:14 - 01:37:24:11]
Stephen Wade
called Sinful Tunes and Spirituals. And in half of that book is about banjo and banjo sightings in English. She's just working with English language sources. Since then, scholars have worked with French and other language sources to talk about banjo. But
[01:37:24:11 - 01:37:27:06]
Stephen Wade
the cover of the picture is a painting that's
[01:37:27:06 - 01:37:29:23]
Stephen Wade
of a blind banjo player
[01:37:31:00 - 01:37:43:15]
Stephen Wade
with a gourd banjo. That painting is still on display there at the Philadelphia Library Company. And she inspires
[01:37:46:06 - 01:38:03:03]
Stephen Wade
Scott Ditlake. And then he starts making that. And I think the second banjo he made is the one I have. Because I was also alert to Dena, who became a very close friend of mine. And in fact what really brought us together was something bigger than the banjo.
[01:38:04:16 - 01:38:07:12]
Stephen Wade
So, I'm playing in Chicago in 1992,
[01:38:09:03 - 01:38:10:10]
Stephen Wade
performing in a theater.
[01:38:11:17 - 01:38:20:00]
Stephen Wade
And I go visit her on the South Side. She was the music librarian at the University of Chicago at the Regenstein Library.
[01:38:21:03 - 01:38:30:15]
Stephen Wade
So she knew a lot about the history of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and about early music publishing in Chicago. She had a lot of interest, not just rural music,
[01:38:30:15 - 01:38:32:13]
Stephen Wade
she says, "So what else are you working on?"
[01:38:34:04 - 01:38:36:21]
Stephen Wade
I said, "Well," and I pulled out a couple pages of
[01:38:39:05 - 01:38:46:13]
Stephen Wade
photocopied of a typewritten account written by a woman who had been at Hull House, the nation's first settlement house.
[01:38:47:20 - 01:38:48:10]
Stephen Wade
Her name was
[01:38:48:10 - 01:38:49:21]
Stephen Wade
Hilda Polacheck.
[01:38:51:09 - 01:38:54:20]
Stephen Wade
And I started reading it to Dena.
[01:38:56:04 - 01:38:58:04]
Stephen Wade
I said, "This is really quite stirring, and
[01:38:59:16 - 01:39:02:17]
Scott Catey
She was afraid, right? if I remember, to go to a dance.
[01:39:02:17 - 01:39:04:13]
Stephen Wade
Right. So that's Hilda.
[01:39:04:13 - 01:39:10:15]
Stephen Wade
so I started reading this thing to Dena, and I say, "Well, so Hilda says,
[01:39:11:20 - 01:39:13:01]
Stephen Wade
who was from Poland
[01:39:14:06 - 01:39:30:05]
Stephen Wade
and come to the United States in 1892, she was born in 1882, and she's working in the factory, making shirt cuffs in a factory all day long with
[01:39:31:08 - 01:39:39:19]
Stephen Wade
her sisters. And she's on cuffs ten hours a day. And at age 13, she attends this Christmas party at Hull House
[01:39:41:04 - 01:39:42:21]
Stephen Wade
with an Irish playmate. And
[01:39:43:21 - 01:39:44:06]
Stephen Wade
she
[01:39:45:10 - 01:39:52:20]
Stephen Wade
had trepidation in approaching it because in Poland, a Jewish girl like herself wouldn't go out on Christmas night. Dangerous.
[01:39:54:02 - 01:40:18:00]
Stephen Wade
But her classmate, or her friend says, "Well, a playmate says, "Well, nobody." She says to her playmate, "I might get killed." She says, "Nobody gets killed, Jane Anderson's Christmas party. I went there last year, I went there a year before, and everything else." What are you talking about? So Hilda goes. Doesn't tell her mother she's going to go out on Christmas night, but she goes. So I was told, and I don't hear her words.
[01:40:19:02 - 01:40:34:14]
Stephen Wade
So I was told I could go to a Christmas party at Hull House. I instinctively shrunk at the very thought. I told my little Catholic friend, "I never go to Christmas parties. Why not?" she asked. I told her, "Because I might get killed. Get killed!" She stared at me. I went to the Hull House Christmas party last year and year before, and no one was killed.
[01:40:36:03 - 01:40:55:21]
Stephen Wade
So without telling her mother before, I had Hilda. So here's Hilda's words again. So she mentions the candles on the trees and the singing of carols. And she continues, "After the singing, Jane Addams, who was the head of Hull House, told us how glad she was that we had all come to her party. The sincerity of her words shone in her eyes. I knew that she meant every word she was saying.
[01:40:57:01 - 01:41:20:06]
Stephen Wade
I became an American at this party. I was with children who had been brought to America from all corners of the earth. The fathers and mothers of all of us had come in search of a free and happy life, and we were having a good time at the party. We were all poor. Most of us were underfed. Some of us had torn shoes, but we were not afraid of each other."
[01:41:21:23 - 01:41:30:22]
Stephen Wade
And so I read this to Dena, whose eyes are, I noticed while I was reading it aloud, their eyes were getting very wide. And she said,
[01:41:32:03 - 01:41:32:22]
Stephen Wade
"That's my mother."
[01:41:32:22 - 01:41:34:18]
Scott Catey
Oh my God, are you kidding?
[01:41:34:18 - 01:41:35:20]
Stephen Wade
No, I'm not kidding.
[01:41:35:20 - 01:41:36:12]
Scott Catey
Wow.
[01:41:38:09 - 01:41:39:04]
Scott Catey
Chills.
[01:41:40:12 - 01:41:43:09]
Stephen Wade
So for me and Dena, from that time on, we
[01:41:44:14 - 01:41:47:12]
Stephen Wade
had something very close. And
[01:41:49:10 - 01:42:15:09]
Stephen Wade
I mean, she mentions my banjo and stuff in the second edition of her book, and all that, and Scott too. Scott Didlake. But this is what really brought us close.
Scott Catey
That's incredible.
Stephen Wade
Yeah, I thought so. That's not in this book, that story, about me reading it aloud to Dena Epstein, but that was her mom, because she was Dena Polacheck Epstein at the time. And so
[01:42:17:22 - 01:42:24:01]
Stephen Wade
that kind of cementing those relationships, that interconnection, those connections, that means so much to me. And
[01:42:25:05 - 01:42:35:06]
Stephen Wade
that's sort of like what I was trying to tell you about Casey Jones. And I went to his community where he was born in Texas, and just trying to learn about him. These interconnections of people.
[01:42:35:06 - 01:42:36:15]
Stephen Wade
matter to me. They're
[01:42:39:06 - 01:42:39:20]
Stephen Wade
palpable.
[01:42:41:19 - 01:43:00:05]
Scott Catey
The idea also that you just read from Hilda that we're all coming together at this party. We're not afraid, and we're becoming American, right? That's a very classic sort of way of understanding how people do come together in America and transform into
[01:43:01:06 - 01:43:05:22]
Scott Catey
Americans and solidify relationships and continue the
[01:43:07:01 - 01:43:08:06]
Scott Catey
evolution as it were.
[01:43:08:06 - 01:43:09:11]
Stephen Wade
Yeah, I mean,
[01:43:10:14 - 01:43:13:15]
Stephen Wade
Hilda stayed, Hilda and her ethnic,
[01:43:15:06 - 01:43:22:20]
Stephen Wade
and ethnicities, and all these parts that are so complicated about American identity and makes it
[01:43:25:12 - 01:43:27:01]
Stephen Wade
this great, you know, polyglot.
[01:43:27:01 - 01:43:28:08]
Scott Catey
the idea that I
[01:43:29:10 - 01:43:31:05]
Scott Catey
had as I'm reading the book,
[01:43:32:06 - 01:43:36:06]
Scott Catey
Stephen, it feels to me like a love letter to
[01:43:38:08 - 01:43:44:10]
Scott Catey
music and musicians. And there's a real strong sense of love letter to Chicago.
[01:43:44:10 - 01:43:55:15]
Stephen Wade
Well, yes. I've lived most of my life in Washington, but I certainly grew up in Chicago. And I don't talk about Washington very much, there. My life is a tale of two cities.
[01:43:56:17 - 01:44:04:20]
Stephen Wade
Richard Harrington said that to me last time we talked on the phone. And I thought, that's really sweet, what him saying. He said, you were so lucky. You grew up in Chicago, and you
[01:44:07:03 - 01:44:12:08]
Stephen Wade
saw Mahalia Jackson. That's the spiritual singer I was trying to think of before. And Muddy Waters.
[01:44:13:10 - 01:44:24:13]
Stephen Wade
But there was this other music that you studied here at the Library of Congress and what was around here. And that's true. My life has centered
[01:44:25:23 - 01:44:33:16]
Stephen Wade
itself on these two fulcrums, geographically speaking, of Washington and Chicago. And
[01:44:35:22 - 01:44:42:10]
Stephen Wade
this does repeatedly locate in Chicago in these stories.
[01:44:47:07 - 01:45:14:15]
Stephen Wade
This is not a memoir, but there is an element of certainly sort of in the background connecting to some of these people, because these were people I knew. These are promises kept, promises made, and I hope promises kept, let's put it that way. Because I told these people I would do something with this. This is why I was taking their time. And Doc Hopkins, in particular, for instance, wanted his story told.
[01:45:17:09 - 01:45:36:09]
Stephen Wade
Will Keys, who's in another chapter, who is a banjo player from East Tennessee, who had this great sense of self-reliance. He had a method of playing the banjo. He couldn't teach it. He couldn't even slow it down. I have no idea how he pulled it off. Any way you can, right? Any way you can.
[01:45:36:09 - 01:46:08:23]
Stephen Wade
wrote these in acronyms, A-W-I-C. And then any old way you can see fit to do it, and all that initials. So he wrote me letters about that. He knew he had a system, and it was his. It was based on tradition, but it was his innovation within it. And he lived a life working with scarce materials and did a lot with it. He would fashion the bridges of his banjo from discarded parts at the factory, Eastman factory, where he worked.
[01:46:10:01 - 01:46:14:13]
Stephen Wade
And carve with his whittling knife, make banjo bridges from it.
[01:46:14:13 - 01:46:19:08]
Scott Catey
I mean, very fine carving, right? That takes some time and patience.
[01:46:19:08 - 01:46:29:06]
Stephen Wade
Yeah, I have pictures of a chess set he made. He didn't even play chess, but he did it for a friend. He would do things like carve little wooden shoes and stuff.
[01:46:29:06 - 01:46:41:01]
Stephen Wade
was greatly inventive. And he is an example of that old spiritual making a way out of no way. He worked, and he said that's how it was. And when he started playing his first banjo,
[01:46:42:08 - 01:46:44:20]
Stephen Wade
strings were made out of screen door wire.
[01:46:44:20 - 01:46:45:18]
Scott Catey
When
[01:46:45:18 - 01:46:47:16]
Scott Catey
I read that in the book, I
[01:46:50:09 - 01:46:54:14]
Scott Catey
was flabbergasted to take screen door wire and turn it into a banjo string. That's
[01:46:55:15 - 01:47:02:09]
Scott Catey
inventive, first of all, working with what you have. But also my first thought is how do you do that?
[01:47:02:09 - 01:47:09:10]
Stephen Wade
Well, carefully, I guess you extract the wire and you tighten it up and you tighten them in different pitches, one from the other.
[01:47:09:10 - 01:47:12:07]
Scott Catey
And presumably wind some strands together?
[01:47:12:07 - 01:47:22:12]
Stephen Wade
Yeah, maybe so. And his brother was encouraging him. And then he figures out the sort of pianistic way of playing the banjo based on how his older sisters are playing the piano.
[01:47:24:04 - 01:47:28:04]
Scott Catey
Does that mean it's more percussive? No, I think that's how it made it more melodic.
[01:47:28:04 - 01:47:35:19]
Stephen Wade
And he had this eclectic range. I mentioned at the beginning of that chapter, we were working at the Smithsonian Festival on the mall
[01:47:37:10 - 01:47:41:02]
Stephen Wade
some years back. I was emceeing a
[01:47:42:05 - 01:47:44:03]
Stephen Wade
Appalachian workshop there.
[01:47:44:03 - 01:47:49:23]
Stephen Wade
asked Will to play a tune and said, sure, he plays Hello Dolly.
[01:47:53:04 - 01:47:54:07]
Stephen Wade
What?
[01:47:56:19 - 01:47:59:16]
Scott Catey
Can you play Hello Dolly on the banjo?
Stephen Wade
He sure did.
[01:47:59:16 - 01:48:03:18]
Scott Catey
Can you?
Stephen Wade
I never tried it. Oh really? So, but just,
[01:48:05:06 - 01:48:13:11]
Stephen Wade
that was Will, you know. So he was unique and representative at the exceptional and representative at the same time.
[01:48:13:11 - 01:48:15:22]
Scott Catey
One of the, Robert Mack,
[01:48:15:22 - 01:48:22:20]
Scott Catey
you have a quote from Robert Mack about the comparison between the exceptional and the representative.
[01:48:22:20 - 01:48:25:02]
Stephen Wade
that's Robert, that's Mack McCormick.
[01:48:25:02 - 01:48:30:15]
Stephen Wade
you are absolutely right to pick on that. And he, yes, he said to me, I was in Houston visiting him,
[01:48:31:22 - 01:48:39:06]
Stephen Wade
and I had flown down there, I was playing in Dallas, and I wanted to see him, because he had written some liner notes
[01:48:40:07 - 01:48:53:03]
Stephen Wade
long time ago about Henry Thomas, who is the source of the song of "Going Up the Country," is a theme song in the Woodstock movies. Right. Well, he records it, and then Canned Heat learns it from him.
[01:48:53:03 - 01:48:58:22]
Stephen Wade
and I'll read to you what he says, if I may.
[01:48:58:22 - 01:49:11:17]
Stephen Wade
He says what, he asked me, because I was taking notes at the time, he said, what really tells about the culture? And we were talking about the exceptionality of Uncle Dave Macon, first star who's been on the Opry. He said,
[01:49:12:21 - 01:49:32:05]
Stephen Wade
that set him apart. He was exceptionally granted that complete. But he said over the course, and here I'll just quote what I wrote, Mac had found over the course of his musicology, first in one of Houston's wards, and then in counties across the state, the need to quote, find the predominances. That is to pay attention to
[01:49:33:07 - 01:49:37:04]
Stephen Wade
average players as much as to the music's most notable exponents.
[01:49:38:07 - 01:50:16:11]
Stephen Wade
So he said, American culture, he said some of American culture, he said, no, I'm quoting him here, is represented by Duke Ellington, some by Ernest Hemingway, and some by street singers. And so that's right, there's this arc. So it's not a hierarchy in a sense, it's just all these things go on. That's what I meant. I don't mean that concert hall is loftier than the front porch. It's on no point is that suggested in this book. They're just different environments and that this occurs on. And that's what the same thing is. As he said, look at the culture as a map quote of all the things that tie human beings to a landscape,
[01:50:17:16 - 01:50:23:23]
Stephen Wade
which is quite a thing to say. And he talked about food recipes, they're shared in the same way that
[01:50:25:04 - 01:50:43:07]
Stephen Wade
language in which everyone is a participant. And that's what I'm thinking about. And I think as a message here, without being too explicit about it, but letting him tell us that. But yes, I thought he was saying something really important and I'm really glad that you picked up on that and what it was about
[01:50:46:06 - 01:50:47:03]
Stephen Wade
Mac McCormick.
[01:50:49:04 - 01:50:50:16]
Scott Catey
That's one of my favorite chapters, that one.
[01:50:50:16 - 01:50:54:15]
Stephen Wade
I'm so grateful. That's the longest chapter in the book by the way, and thank you.
[01:50:57:09 - 01:51:03:12]
Stephen Wade
You see, it started for me with the song, the Arcade Blues that Uncle Dave Macon sang. And I was just
[01:51:05:01 - 01:51:09:05]
Stephen Wade
drawn to that song many years ago. And then I went,
[01:51:10:09 - 01:51:15:17]
Stephen Wade
when I was with Macon's family, I was with them several times. On one of my trips
[01:51:18:00 - 01:51:32:05]
Stephen Wade
I'd seen his son who played guitar with him and drove their car for many years out of Dorris Macon, and I went over to the Nashville Arcade. And it was strange and haunting because the arcade was this beautiful sort of Victorian building,
[01:51:33:12 - 01:51:36:14]
Stephen Wade
skylights and two stories of shops.
[01:51:38:23 - 01:51:40:15]
Stephen Wade
It was a haunted song about,
[01:51:43:08 - 01:51:46:09]
Stephen Wade
which had to do with prostitution and things like that,
[01:51:47:15 - 01:51:47:23]
Stephen Wade
and
[01:51:49:01 - 01:51:52:18]
Stephen Wade
as well as rather country elocutions in it, but this
[01:51:54:23 - 01:52:21:08]
Stephen Wade
other part of it. And he's talking about the Nashville Arcade deliberately. I mean he mentions a man. I found out who he was. I mean he mentions a man who worked at that music store who sold records at the arcade. And he was a real guy. And then I found a letter that Uncle Dave Macon wrote where he's talking about, "Can I buy an old copy of the arcade blues and give one to that man and one for myself?" And the letter he wrote down, "What makes it?" And I
[01:52:22:22 - 01:52:32:19]
Stephen Wade
went to the arcade and it was just exactly the same atmosphere as in the song. I couldn't believe it. There was trafficking going on there. And you could tell by the way people were looking at me.
[01:52:34:16 - 01:52:42:08]
Stephen Wade
And so this is 50, 60 years after the song was recorded. You hear this atmosphere is the same.
[01:52:44:05 - 01:52:50:00]
Stephen Wade
So I tried to explore the history of that song, which had a long history because it's based
[01:52:51:06 - 01:52:52:03]
Stephen Wade
in one
[01:52:53:08 - 01:52:55:10]
Stephen Wade
of the earliest published 12-bar blues
[01:52:56:16 - 01:53:00:23]
Stephen Wade
there was in print. And
[01:53:02:11 - 01:53:05:00]
Stephen Wade
I just go from there to
[01:53:06:21 - 01:53:32:08]
Stephen Wade
his accompanist. I got to know his generation the generation of people who played with Uncle Dave were 30 years younger than Uncle Dave. So I got to know them because he's born in 1870. He dies in 1952. But the accompanists who were born in 1899 and stuff, they're around when I'm around. So I got to meet them and know them and learn from them. And so I was able to take it in that way. Plus I knew
[01:53:34:07 - 01:53:39:23]
Stephen Wade
two of Uncle Dave's sons and other family members nephews, nieces
[01:53:41:04 - 01:53:41:16]
Stephen Wade
and such.
[01:53:43:18 - 01:53:44:23]
Scott Catey
One of the things that
[01:53:46:12 - 01:53:57:15]
Scott Catey
let me contextualize this for you, Steve. I'm a big fan of Walter Benjamin. Do you know him? Yes. And when I was reading the book, I had to
[01:53:58:21 - 01:54:00:19]
Scott Catey
stop and
[01:54:01:22 - 01:54:29:19]
Scott Catey
kind of recenter myself when you're talking about Arcade Blues because it reminds me so much and your vignette of going there 50 years later. It reminds me so much of Benjamin's arcades project. He's trying to diagnose something about the European condition based on these arcade mercantiles, basically. And there's such a resonance for me in the story that you tell of how
[01:54:31:05 - 01:54:57:04]
Scott Catey
much a place sort of implodes so many things. Of threads or fragments, whatever we want to call them, come together in this place and they produce both the worst of us prostitution and trafficking and the best of us, like the transformation of Dave Macon's Arcade Blues. So that picture that you paint for me is like this is universal in a sense.
[01:54:57:04 - 01:55:18:05]
Stephen Wade
Well, I am thrilled that you would say that and I thank you for saying that. He certainly plays a role in analyses that Douglas Wixson gave to Jack Conroy, whose picture appears in the book, and who was my friend. The last piece that Jack ever wrote was a piece he and I wrote together, Heart, Head, Hearty. That was a tall tale we wrote.
[01:55:19:12 - 01:55:40:04]
Stephen Wade
And Jack used so many resources to create his storytelling and his writing that he did in the 30s. He had grown up in a mining community in Missouri and his father and brothers died in the mines. Jack went to work full-time last school at age 13 to work as an
[01:55:41:08 - 01:55:45:14]
Stephen Wade
apprentice car repairman in the Wabash Yards in Moberly, Missouri.
[01:55:46:21 - 01:55:53:19]
Stephen Wade
And oh, he did go to college for a short time later on, but there was a great railroad strike of 1922.
[01:55:55:16 - 01:56:05:11]
Stephen Wade
He was a writer and he worked factory jobs during the day, worked in Toledo in a rubber factory, worked in Willys-Overland Plant. He worked
[01:56:06:17 - 01:56:10:08]
Stephen Wade
as an industrial worker who wrote by night and
[01:56:11:14 - 01:56:15:07]
Stephen Wade
eventually started a little magazine in Missouri and
[01:56:17:00 - 01:56:29:15]
Stephen Wade
was later in the 30s part of the Missouri Writers Project. The Missouri Writers Project in St. Louis sort of collapsed and Nelson Algren invited him to come to Chicago
[01:56:30:19 - 01:56:38:09]
Stephen Wade
in 1938 and be on the Illinois Writers Project, which he was. In fact, he was Hilda Polacheck's supervisor.
[01:56:39:17 - 01:56:40:03]
Scott Catey
Small world.
[01:56:40:03 - 01:56:41:07]
Stephen Wade
That's not in the book.
[01:56:43:05 - 01:56:44:12]
Scott Catey
At the shirt cuff factory.
[01:56:44:12 - 01:56:50:02]
Stephen Wade
No, when she, later, she's working in the Federal Writers Project herself.
[01:56:51:15 - 01:57:05:14]
Stephen Wade
Her supervisor was Jack Conroy at the Writers Project in the 30s. The shirt factory is 30 years earlier. Yeah. So she, yeah, these people are weaving into each other.
[01:57:06:17 - 01:57:14:10]
Scott Catey
They're weaving pretty hardcore into each other. Yeah. Yeah. That's not just happenstance, right? That's, I don't know, the tides of history.
[01:57:14:10 - 01:57:19:08]
Stephen Wade
Well, we're all unreconstructed new dealers here. So
[01:57:23:09 - 01:57:28:20]
Stephen Wade
Jack is in Chicago and I mentioned a memo in the last chapter. They received
[01:57:31:10 - 01:57:39:10]
Stephen Wade
about, from Benjamin Botkin, who was head of the folk writing that was going on for the Federal Writers Project everywhere, and
[01:57:40:21 - 01:58:03:19]
Stephen Wade
to gather and collect industrial folktales. And that was really Jack, there's a piece attributed to Nelson Algren that Jack wrote for him that Nelson signed so that Nelson could fulfill the assignment. He said to Jack, this isn't what I do. I mean, he's writing about, you know, the man with the golden arm, you know. He's not writing about
[01:58:05:01 - 01:58:18:04]
Stephen Wade
people like Charlie DeMilo, the clown, or Slappy Hooper, “the world's bestest sign painter.” He's writing about, you know, other kinds of people from working backgrounds.
[01:58:18:04 - 01:58:21:07]
Scott Catey
So Slappy Hooper, the guy that invented rainbows.
[01:58:21:07 - 01:58:23:02]
Stephen Wade
Right, right, and painted that. So
[01:58:24:09 - 01:58:26:19]
Stephen Wade
that's when his colors all smooshed together. That's right.
[01:58:28:11 - 01:58:28:14]
Stephen Wade
So
[01:58:31:05 - 01:58:33:10]
Stephen Wade
Jack is writing these tall tales
[01:58:34:11 - 01:58:43:16]
Stephen Wade
which are based on oral tales he had heard, but he had a writer's capacity to animate it into his prose.
[01:58:43:16 - 01:58:46:11]
Stephen Wade
So he would go into the King's Palace and
[01:58:48:06 - 01:59:04:00]
Stephen Wade
he and Algren said they were doing their research there this way. Research is definitely in the word, in quotes, because he'd buy 30 drinks, put them on the bar, and say, now it's the denizens of the bar. You tell me a story, I'll give you a drink.
[01:59:05:02 - 02:00:01:13]
Stephen Wade
That was his research method. He used the word research advisedly, believing. And one of the persons he met there was a superannuated carnival worker by the name of Charlie D'Amelio who had two pet chihuahuas. He called himself Sum Sum, the Hollywood clown, clever, classy comedy with a kick. And when Jack Madam, Charlie, who was a wool scrawny guy, he said, powerful, sorry guy, but little guy, was lifting one of the tables in the bar with his teeth. He said he gave him awful pain in his jaw to watch him do that. And he was doing a sort of strongman routine in the King's Palace. See, it's always a prayer to get a nail stuck in his, and Charlie said it was a prayer to get a nail stuck in his teeth. And he said he went to his, he lived in a boarding house and he had notices from better days pasted on the side of his theatrical trunk and he had played for the Czar.
[02:00:03:11 - 02:00:16:07]
Stephen Wade
And stuff like this. And so Charlie told him the story of the rival high divers. I used to do this in "Banjo Dancing" and my one man show about the two divers competing in increasingly higher
[02:00:17:19 - 02:00:20:12]
Stephen Wade
stair steps up the ladder to eventually,
[02:00:21:23 - 02:00:22:18]
Stephen Wade
Charlie is,
[02:00:25:15 - 02:00:36:20]
Stephen Wade
Billy the Dolphin is saying, well, you wonder why I'm limping this way. It's because he, his competitor, Eddie Labrine, the human seal, had,
[02:00:38:15 - 02:00:41:02]
Stephen Wade
they were diving finally into wet bath mats
[02:00:42:08 - 02:00:47:22]
Stephen Wade
and he had wrung it out. And
[02:00:50:18 - 02:00:52:23]
Stephen Wade
if he didn't do it, who did? That's right.
[02:00:52:23 - 02:00:57:15]
Scott Catey
Tell me, do you want to, shall we play something, Stephen?
Stephen Wade
Okay.
Scott Catey
What would you like to play?
[02:00:57:15 - 02:01:01:18]
Stephen Wade
I'll play you a tune I learned from Kirk McGee. He's in that chapter.
[02:01:03:12 - 02:01:08:07]
Stephen Wade
He and his brother Sam were Uncle Dave's accompanist on a number of those famous records.
[02:01:10:14 - 02:01:11:05]
Stephen Wade
And
[02:01:12:11 - 02:01:15:22]
Stephen Wade
this is a tune that Kirk played on the five string banjo
[02:01:20:03 - 02:01:21:16]
Stephen Wade
called "Snowdrop."
[02:03:05:22 - 02:03:10:05]
Scott Catey
Tell me about your picking technique. It's three finger. Am I saying that right?
[02:03:10:05 - 02:03:15:03]
Stephen Wade
Well, I was doing two finger. I was doing up-picking and I was doing the three fingers. So here,
[02:03:17:00 - 02:03:18:06]
Stephen Wade
that's just an index finger.
[02:03:26:17 - 02:03:28:12]
Stephen Wade
That's sort of a two finger pinch.
[02:03:33:20 - 02:03:36:12]
Stephen Wade
There I'm doing a two finger with a, with a rush down.
[02:03:43:04 - 02:03:44:22]
Stephen Wade
Now I'll go into a three finger arpeggio.
[02:04:03:20 - 02:04:12:01]
Stephen Wade
So I was sort of varying a little bit to get different textures. And then adding a harmony.
[02:04:21:13 - 02:04:25:12]
Scott Catey
You've had an amazing career, Steve. You're an author.
[02:04:27:04 - 02:04:29:10]
Scott Catey
You've got albums out. You did
[02:04:30:10 - 02:04:48:20]
Scott Catey
banjo dancing for a decade.
Stephen Wade
Two decades.
Scott Catey
Two decades. Banjo dancing sort of you opened the book with... The first night of it ever. The first night of it ever. The jitters and the feeling and the enthusiasm and the excitement and all of that. Yeah. And then it sort of culminates in Chapter 11 as well.
[02:04:48:20 - 02:04:56:00]
Stephen Wade
That's right. It comes back to that. Yes, because what inhabited banjo dancing were all these other people.
[02:04:57:21 - 02:05:00:14]
Stephen Wade
It's just a way to sort of start into something larger.
[02:05:00:14 - 02:05:07:05]
Scott Catey
And the larger is, I mean, you catch the tune, you put your hands on the tune, you do the tune any way you can.
[02:05:08:19 - 02:05:16:18]
Scott Catey
And there's people and institutions and history and all of these things in each of the tunes that you play.
[02:05:16:18 - 02:05:21:13]
Stephen Wade
what happened to me, and I think I mentioned this in the closing chapter, is that
[02:05:23:04 - 02:05:36:01]
Stephen Wade
I got on stage because Fleming Brown said to me, the only way you're going to know how well you know a tune is to play it in front of people, you're automatically going to forget 50 percent of what you've practiced. So you have to get in front. It'll be a
[02:05:37:13 - 02:05:39:18]
Stephen Wade
tool, a heuristic tool, something to
[02:05:41:10 - 02:05:46:00]
Stephen Wade
test yourself with, learn what you know, what you really know, what's really embedded in you.
[02:05:47:18 - 02:05:53:22]
Stephen Wade
Because he said you don't really know a tune to play it a thousand times. So the first time I got on stage at this joint,
[02:05:55:06 - 02:06:00:02]
Stephen Wade
Fleming introduced me, he gave me a great introduction. It's like, you know, a sound to use car, you know.
[02:06:03:01 - 02:06:14:22]
Stephen Wade
And I played these three fast banjo tunes. In each tune I could see the audience is getting further and further away. And the volume level in the bar room was going up because people were not interested. It was not compelling them.
[02:06:17:11 - 02:06:22:13]
Stephen Wade
But Fleming said you have to come back next week too. You have to figure this out.
[02:06:24:00 - 02:06:27:22]
Stephen Wade
And I did, I guess, because I came back the following week and I had
[02:06:29:05 - 02:06:58:08]
Stephen Wade
something I been interested in for a long time, a sort of highly charged, poetically inspired speech of an effective Arkansas legislator. The man who had changed the name of Arkansas is the original iron-jawed brass mounted copper-bellied corpse maker from the wilds of the Ozarks, sired by a hurricane, and half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on his mother's side. He is the man they call sudden death and general desolation. The stuff like that.
[02:06:59:11 - 02:06:59:23]
Stephen Wade
And I.
[02:06:59:23 - 02:07:17:11]
Stephen Wade
I had the whole speech in a paperback in my pocket and I pulled it out and I was reading from it with the left hand plucking the banjo at the right and the place went up for grabs. And that's when I knew what it was going to be.
[02:07:18:12 - 02:07:19:17]
Scott Catey
A tall tale brings them in.
[02:07:19:17 - 02:07:38:03]
Stephen Wade
That language. Everybody knew that grandiloquent, boast thing. It was familiar. It was fun. It was goofy and magnificent, majestic and eloquent in all its own grassroots ways. And that held the audience's attention and it was a wonderful moment. And
[02:07:39:11 - 02:07:43:20]
Stephen Wade
that was critical for me and seeing what the future might
[02:07:44:23 - 02:08:00:16]
Stephen Wade
portend. And also I already liked talking songs by then. I loved Bukka White's "Pan Am Limited" and his Special Streamline. I loved those talking songs. I loved Doc Hopkins did a talking song, "Trouble at the Coal Creek Mines," which is
[02:08:02:02 - 02:08:10:07]
Stephen Wade
talking as well as playing as well as sound effects he made of the train whooshing and going into the tunnel and all this stuff. And
[02:08:11:18 - 02:09:09:08]
Stephen Wade
in the church, the Black Church, you would hear people, the chorus is, the pianist, the organist is on one side, the singers are on the other, the minister's in between, and he's moving between spoken word to singing, to music. And this was clearly something artful going on and conscious in that. And I loved that. So that was musically accompanied spoken word. So I had all those ghosts and all those foundations, palatial foundations to depend on in developing banjo dancing. And so come 1978, I had enough material, I thought, and I'd had some reviews and variety and "Melody Maker" in the New York Times that maybe someone would take a chance on me. So I said, well, try the body politic. It's a city-sourced off-loop theater. So they put me in their smallest theater and
[02:09:11:06 - 02:09:47:17]
Stephen Wade
life changed overnight for me. It really did. I mean, it was a Cinderella story. It was a four-week run and it was amazing and generous. And then I became the luckiest kid in America because the National Drama Critics Convention met in Chicago that summer. And the chief critic apparently said, well, the show to go to is this kid playing a banjo. And all of a sudden, I was on Time magazine and Wall Street Journal and LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and all these places. And that's how come I played at the White House. And that was all because of that. Things coalesced. So lightning struck. And
[02:09:48:19 - 02:09:49:21]
Stephen Wade
so that's what happened.
[02:09:49:21 - 02:09:54:20]
(Music Playing)
[02:11:54:14 - 02:11:56:01]
Stephen Wade
It's called "Hand in Hand."
[02:11:56:01 - 02:11:59:16]
(Music Playing)
[02:14:06:06 - 02:14:09:09]
Stephen Wade
There's the cherry blossom waltz. Those two go together, I think.
[02:14:29:22 - 02:14:38:06]
Stephen Wade
Well, I'm going up the creek. I've gone down a week. Ain't coming back this way.
[02:14:41:18 - 02:14:43:03]
Stephen Wade
Tied on the round.
[02:14:44:03 - 02:14:48:07]
Stephen Wade
I've got blood on the ground.
[02:14:48:07 - 02:14:54:01]
Stephen Wade
Side track, this train will take you to work.
[02:14:54:01 - 02:15:24:01]
(Music Playing)
[02:15:25:04 - 02:15:32:19]
Stephen Wade
Oh, Robin had a wreck. Broke problems in there.
[02:15:33:21 - 02:15:36:16]
Stephen Wade
Ain't coming back no more.
[02:15:38:03 - 02:15:40:04]
Stephen Wade
Well, I'm going up the creek.
[02:15:41:05 - 02:15:42:14]
Stephen Wade
I've gone about a week.
[02:15:44:06 - 02:15:47:15]
Stephen Wade
Ain't coming back this way.
[02:15:48:22 - 02:15:52:04]
(Music Playing)
[02:15:56:14 - 02:16:16:10]
Stephen Wade
I've tired of moving round.
[02:16:17:10 - 02:16:18:23]
Stephen Wade
I've tired of moving round.
[02:16:20:16 - 02:16:22:02]
Stephen Wade
Blood on the ground.
[02:16:24:02 - 02:16:28:22]
Stephen Wade
Side track, this train will take you to work.
[02:16:28:22 - 02:17:18:09]
Scott Catey
There’s an America I miss. An America that I long for again. The America of Casey Jones and Mae West, of tall tales and community. A past that haunts our present, but tends to get hidden by our technology, our distractions, and our diminishing attention spans.
[02:17:20:04 - 02:17:35:04]
Scott Catey
For me, the promise of this past lives especially in music, and Stephen Wade is a kind of antidote to distraction and forgetting. We've glimpsed that remedy in today's conversation with Steve, but a fuller realization of it lives in his books and his music.
[02:17:36:08 - 02:18:18:21]
Scott Catey
His new book, "Our Common Life, Folk Songs from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall," is out now, published by the University of Illinois Press, and it's a wonderful expression of Steve's approach to life and the world of music we share and inherit and inhabit. You can find a link to the book in the show notes, along with more ways to connect with Stephen Wade. My deepest thanks to Steve for joining me today on the sum of all wisdom and bringing the sumptuous endowments of his intellect and musicality to the show. I hope you enjoyed it too, and that you take something away that helps to restore optimism and hope and memory of what can be when we live what we love.
[02:18:18:21 - 02:18:56:13]
Scott Catey
If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd invite you to continue exploring it. Visit thesumofallwisdom.com for show notes, essays, transcripts, field notes, and our listening rooms, where each conversation becomes part of a larger archive of musical craft and creative wisdom. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing, following the show, leaving a review, or sharing it with someone who loves music and the people who make it. And check out our Patreon site, where you can help ensure that The Sum of All Wisdom is able to continue and flourish. For now, I'm Scott Catey. Remember to stay curious,
[02:18:56:13 - 02:18:57:10]
Scott Catey
See you next time.
[02:18:57:10 - 02:19:14:14]