Voices of Our Common Life

In this talk, musician and author Stephen Wade explores his new book, Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall (University of Illinois Press, 2026). The book, its research drawn in part from the Newberry’s modern manuscripts collections, begins in Bughouse Square with its leather lunged orators and their artfully overheated rhetoric. That soapbox forum, and others like it that once dotted the city, before nighttime television and indoor air conditioning dissipated listeners out for a summer’s evening, summons an imaginative counterpart in the playful and extravagant speech found in early American stage plays and comic literature. Among the radiations of this tall talk tradition, much embraced in Chicago by locally-based scholars and collectors, Stephen Wade created Banjo Dancing which opened in May 1979 at the Body Politic, the city’s first off-Loop theater. The show built on this verbal foundation, coupled with traditional Southern music. Such sources fill this book. Kentucky-born musician Doc Hopkins, and his Chicago-based student, Fleming Brown, who learned the five-string banjo over coffee and rolls before Doc’s early morning WLS broadcasts in the late 1940s, leads to other musicians and talkers. These include writer Jack Conroy, Chicago Daily News editor Lloyd Lewis, Grand Ole Opry performer Uncle Dave Macon and his accompanists, blues artists David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Jim Schwall, rural banjoists Thaddeus Willingham and Omer Forster, and Mississippi storyteller Helen Marie Rowe. Rowe, a mother of sixteen, twelve of whom survived, found in the antebellum tales she learned from her grandmother, a way of putting her brood to sleep. In doing so, she offered a domestic entertainment no less expressive than the soapboxers who populated the hobohemias of Chicago. As Will Keys, another of the musicians featured here once told the author about his way of playing, it’s “AWYC, Any Way You Can.” These individuals and their stories speak to a resourcefulness of our common life, a creative freedom that echoes just outside this library’s grand entrance. View a trailer for Our Common Life on YouTube. A book signing follows the program (which includes live music). Native Chicagoan Stephen Wade, a past Newberry fellow and contributor to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, is a Grammy-nominated musician and writer. He is the author of the award-winning book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience (University of Illinois Press, 2012). A recipient of Chicago’s Joseph Jefferson award, his Banjo Dancing became in its day one of the five longest running, off-Broadway shows in the United States. Colloquium is a weekly series of talks featuring staff, fellows, and scholars who are working with the library’s vast collections. These events bring together experts from various fields to share their research on a wide range of topics, followed by an opportunity for the audience to ask questions and engage in conversation. Colloquium is open to the public and offers a chance to explore fascinating ideas and new discoveries. No advance registration is required. Call us at (312) 255-3602 or send us an email.