Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall explores the workings of informal culture. The individuals described in its pages are largely musicians, some born in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and others in the first decades of the twentieth. In exemplifying folk tradition, they show us something constant and supremely supple at the same time, guided with custom and wisdom adapting to changing circumstances, not through formal means such as regulations and laws, but through observing and doing and responding and venturing, ready for anything and everything that may come along. Based on first-person fieldwork coupled with archival research, the book views how folk and vernacular creativity, fundamental to these artists and their processes, speaks to a resourcefulness inscribed in the nation’s founding charter and expressed in its common life.

Among the creators and conservators who inhabit these pages are Sid Harkreader, Kirk McGee, Ola Belle Reed, Jewel Fagan Haynes, Cordell and Olean Kemp, Bill Monroe, Helen Marie Rowe, Virgil and Mabel Anderson, Joe and Odell Thompson, Hobart Smith, John Jackson, Huddie Ledbetter, Uncle Dave Macon, Dorris Macon, Raeburn Flerlage, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Jim Schwall, Archie Green, Lloyd Lewis, Thaddeus Willingham, Jack Conroy, and Fleming Brown. As Will Keys, another of the musicians featured here, once told me about his way of playing, “It’s AWYC. Any Way You Can.” These individuals and their stories communicate how folklore offers a way of understanding the world.

In the colloquial, the informal, the casual, and the everyday, dwells as ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson wrote in a 1937 letter: “I have driven 29,000 miles in twenty states in the last eighteen months and I feel as if I had discovered, not America exactly, but Americans.”

Ongoing thread. More from Stephen Wade to follow.