Stephen Wade is a renowned banjo player, folklorist, and author. He joins today to discuss his new book, Our Common Life, and explore our shared musical inheritance, American folk culture, creative individuality, and the promises we make to those whose stories we carry. Episode Summary Every traditional song contains more than notes and words. It carries the traces of musicians, families, communities, migrations, technologies, institutions, and individual acts of invention. Bob Dylan may have sung about containing multitudes, but Stephen Wade gifts us with his wonderful and humane understanding of the multitudes contained in a tune. In this episode of The Sum of All Wisdom, Scott Catey speaks with renowned banjo player, folklorist, historian, and author Stephen Wade about his new book, Our Common Life: Folk Songs from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall, published by the University of Illinois Press. Stephen describes traditional music as a collection of “common possessions with individual contributions.” A tune may pass through generations, but it never remains unchanged. Each musician catches it, puts their hands on it, and contributes something of their own, sometimes surprisingly. Beginning with Stephen’s childhood in Chicago, the conversation follows the people and encounters that shaped his musical life: sidewalk performer Casey Jones and his trained chicken Mae West; blues musicians Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Big Joe Williams; banjo teachers Fleming Brown and Doc Hopkins; and the musicians, writers, and working people whose lives populate Stephen’s research. Along the way, Stephen traces the African and Caribbean ancestry of the banjo, the meeting of Black and European musical traditions, Chicago’s role as a crossroads for American music, and the relationship between changing instruments, technologies, dances, and communities. But this is also a conversation about the responsibilities of memory. Stephen explains that his work represents “promises made” to people who trusted him with their knowledge and stories. Research, in that sense, becomes more than documentation. It is an ethical act: gratitude, reciprocity, and cultural preservation. Episode Highlights Scott and Stephen discuss: Growing up amid Chicago’s sidewalk culture, churches, record shops, radio stations, and blues clubs Casey Jones, the celebrated Chicago street performer who performed with a chicken named Mae West Hearing Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Joe Williams, and Mahalia Jackson as a young person Stephen’s early discovery of guitar, five-string banjo, and American traditional music The differences among five-string, plectrum, tenor, fretless, and gourd banjos How musical styles, social dancing, technology, and instrument design influence one another Stephen’s apprenticeship with Fleming Brown and his relationship with Doc Hopkins Pete Seeger’s influential book How to Play the Five-String BanjoWLS, the National Barn Dance, and Chicago’s place in American broadcasting history The musical lineage connecting Dick Burnett, Doc Hopkins, Fleming Brown, and Stephen Wade The history of “Man of Constant Sorrow” Chicago as both an arrival point and a dissemination point for American music The African and Caribbean origins of the banjo Cultural sharing and cultural distinctiveness in American folk traditions William Sidney Mount’s painting Catching the TuneFolklorist and music librarian Dena Epstein Hilda Polacheck’s transformative childhood experience at Hull House The extraordinary moment Stephen discovered that the historical account he was reading belonged to Dena Epstein’s mother Will Keys, musical self-reliance, and making banjo strings from screen-door wire The relationship between representative musicians and exceptional artists Folklorist and blues researcher Mack McCormick’s idea of “finding the predominances” Uncle Dave Macon and the world contained in “Arcade Blues” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, and the histories concentrated inside particular places Jack Conroy, Nelson Algren, the Federal Writers’ Project, and American working-class storytelling How Stephen combined banjo playing, tall tales, spoken language, and theatrical performance in Banjo DancingThe moment Stephen discovered that musical virtuosity alone was not enough to hold an audience Why performing reveals what a musician has truly learned What it means to catch a tune and pass it forward Memorable Moments Common possessions with individual contributions One of the conversation’s central ideas is that tradition and individuality are not opposites. A song such as Big Joe Williams’s “Baby Please Don’t Go” may become a shared cultural possession, but every musician who performs it brings a distinctive history, voice, technique, and sensibility to the music. Even after recorded sound gave listeners a seemingly fixed version, musicians continued to transform songs through performance. For Stephen, a traditional tune is therefore never the work of only one person. It is an accumulation of encounters. “There are many people in a tune.” Catching the tune Stephen uses “catching the tune” to describe how music passes from one person to another. The phrase evokes William Sidney Mount’s nineteenth-century painting Catching the Tune, which depicts the process of learning music by ear and highlights the physicality of learning, making, and transmitting music. This kind of learning is bodily, social, and attentive. A musician watches, listens, imitates, remembers, and gradually makes the music their own. The tune is inherited, but it must also be recreated. Stephen’s own musical lineage extends through Fleming Brown and Doc Hopkins to Kentucky musician Dick Burnett, who published an early version of “Man of Constant Sorrow.” These connections make musical history immediate: not an abstract timeline, but a chain of people who knew, heard, and taught one another, linking communities, geographies, and centuries. Making a way out of no way East Tennessee banjo player Will Keys embodies another of the episode’s central ideas: creativity under conditions of scarcity. Keys developed a highly individual banjo style that he could neither explain nor slow down sufficiently to teach. As a child, he played an instrument strung with wire taken from a screen door. Later, he carved banjo bridges from discarded materials and made intricate objects for friends. His work exemplified what Stephen calls “making a way out of no way”—using ingenuity, patience, and the materials at hand to create something personal within a shared tradition. The exceptional and the representative Which people best reveal a culture? Stephen recalls a conversation with folklorist and blues researcher Mack McCormick, who encouraged him to pay attention to average practitioners as well as celebrated artists. Duke Ellington and Ernest Hemingway tell us something about American culture, but so do street singers, factory workers, local musicians, crafts...
