Author, music historian and Grammy Award-nominated banjoist and guitarist Stephen Wade’s brand-new book is called Our Common Life (University of Illinois Press, 2026), but it’s the unifying book’s subtitle that perhaps captures its intent equally.
“Folksong From the Front Porch to the Concert Hall” not only illustrates the arc of modern acoustic music via Wade’s historical tales of the adventures of its often overlooked, yet deserving, heroes, but also exemplifies what every musician has in common: the joy of creation, whether they’re the only one hearing it or they’re performing before thousands.
The actual title is more of an attempt to mediate the inherent politicization and racial claims of what continues to constitute folksong in America, even as Wade points out that it was President Gerald Ford who signed the American Folklife Preservation Act into law in 1976.
“I didn’t want to dwell on those aspects, but they’re still definitely there through our current political era,” Wade says by phone from his home in Washington, D.C. “I touch upon them, hopefully with some continuity, but certain arguments in American life are still going on. And I’m reminded of them, here where I live, every day.”
The 73-year-old Wade’s decade-old preceding book, The Beautiful Music All Around Us, practically set the scene for Our Common Life. Documenting the Library of Congress field recordings captured between 1934 and 1942, Wade’s backstories illustrate the people utilizing what was still fledgling electronic recording technology in the Deep South and the Great Plains.
Our Common Life both expands upon and predates its predecessor as a history of pre-modern music, with endless stories from throughout Wade’s life and career. Some of the artists’ names ring familiar, but many are undervalued footnotes in musical history who bear special significance, especially to the author. He attempts to bring their names more into public consciousness here as influential figures, especially since some lived and performed mostly before the advent of modern recording techniques.
There’s Uncle Dave Macon (1870-1952), the gold-toothed Tennessee singer/songwriter, banjoist and comedian who blended country, folk music and vaudeville elements to become the first superstar of the Grand Ole Opry. And Doc Hopkins (1900-1988), an influential Kentucky-born singer, multi-instrumentalist and radio figure who lived most of his adult life in Chicago and performed with Wade.
“I ended up knowing nearly all of Uncle Dave’s former accompanists,” Wade says. “I was fortunate to get to know them in the latter parts of their lives. And Doc was like a grandfather to me in terms of both love and education.”
Other late influential figures include Wade’s banjo teacher (at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago) and previous Macon student Fleming Brown, former Macon pianist Jewell Fagan Haynes, and Washington, D.C., blues performer John Jackson, a friend and former gravedigger who died as Wade played at his bedside.
Wade’s long-running, one-man throwback theatrical presentation Banjo Dancing (which combined traditional music, storytelling and dance) took him throughout the United States from 1979 through 1997. Our Common Life displays tales about the places as well as people from those travels and the ones since, from his native Chicago and the New River Ranch venue in Rising Sun, Md., to throughout Florida and even the White House lawn.
Washington, D.C., was once, in the 1950s and 1960s, a destination for bluegrass and country music performers. The ahead-of-her-time female banjoist/vocalist Ola Belle Reed learned her craft in North Carolina, and then ran the nearby New River Ranch with her brother during that era after she’d married Marylander Bud Reed. Its makeshift plywood stage and seating nonetheless drew country music stars like George Jones, Bill Monroe, and husband-and-wife Johnny Cash and June Carter.
The homespun venue’s front porch-meets-concert hall atmosphere included other scenes unheard of today, like the musical royalty sitting next to fans for food and drinks on its benches. With no security provided, or seemingly needed.
“It was the northernmost spot for Southern musicians to barnstorm,” says Wade. “A fascinating place. I was exposed to blues as a kid in Chicago, being able to peek in the doors of clubs and watch people react to things like Muddy Waters singing ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ I didn’t know what that meant, but they sure seemed to! And the counterpoint to that has been the white string band music in D.C. and its surrounding areas since I moved here in the early 1970s.”
One performance by Wade in the nation’s capital, on Sept. 3, 1979, holds special significance.
“Banjo Dancing started a run in Chicago in May of 1979,” he says, “and I got a wonderful review of it in the Chicago Tribune. But I got even luckier in that the National Drama Critics Convention met in Chicago that summer, and the chief critic reportedly said that the best thing in town was some kid playing the banjo. So all the critics showed up, including T.E. Kalem from Time magazine.”
“[First Lady] Rosalynn Carter read his article, then sent her staff to see me, and the invitation to perform at the White House was issued. I played before around 1,500 people in the bandshell on the south lawn of the White House after President Jimmy Carter had introduced me. And I felt a lot of pressure between that and the fact that all of the major TV networks were there, but President and Mrs. Carter complimented me and took pictures with me afterward. It was an extraordinary experience.”
The most interesting aspect of Our Common Life might be that it dispels the common misconception that all musical genealogy traces back to either classical music or the blues. Non-classical old-time music, pre-recording technology, was a fusion of country, spoken word storytelling, bluegrass, folk and theatrical styles, and songs were more often collected, borrowed, and rearranged than exactingly composed and performed.
“My latest two books are less focused on the collectors of music than the people they collected from,” says Wade. “There was freedom not to just create, but to recreate. Our Common Life is about pedagogy; about learning through the framework of my own learning. I was actually able to learn things directly from some of these people, as opposed to learning things just from their recordings.”
The arguably least interesting aspect of Our Common Life, for the general public, might be its exacting nature. Wade mentions better-known musical quantities like bluegrass pioneers Lester Flatt (vocals, guitar) and Earl Scruggs (banjo), soulful vocalist and pianist Ray Charles, singing folk banjo godfather Pete Seeger, and iconic blues vocalist/guitarist Lead Belly (a.k.a. Huddie Ledbetter), yet casual music fans looking for glimpses of the familiar could get lost in the book’s verbiage and minutiae.
“I tried to write the book in an accessible way,” Wade says. “I tried to think of a broader audience than just music people, because music speaks to a broader element of our lives. I don’t know if I made that point, as that’s up to the reader, but I definitely made attempts to venture there.”
More than 100 of the book’s final pages are footnotes, indicating its exhausting research and detail. So while its approach thus sometimes comes across as more scholarly than casual, Wade’s emphasis is on facts — not the supposed opinions labeled as alternative facts by figures on certain TV networks, radio outlets, and social media sites.
In so doing, he’s indeed crafted a work not just for music historians, but also — as indicated by its subtitle — musicians who find the common satisfactions of singing and playing regardless of the environment. Which makes the book a historical document worthy of comparison to the work of musicologists John Lomax and his son Alan Lomax (both of whom are mentioned numerous times throughout).
Our Common Life is also Wade’s subtle reminder of what constitutes culture in our current culture wars era.
“People’s cultural worlds might be different, but we have commonalities,” he says. “Dividing people by their blood is a problem for me; rejecting people by saying something is mine, and you can’t have it. Culture is not blood. It’s not defined by race or ethnicity. White and Black musicians couldn’t eat together during segregation, but they sure as hell listened to each other and were able to play together. Culture is, at its essence, what gets shared.”
OUR COMMON LIFE: FOLKSONG FROM THE FRONT PORCH TO THE CONCERT HALL, by Stephen Wade, University of Illinois Press, 459 pages, $29.95, www.press.uillinois.edu.