Stephen Wade has played many roles throughout his life. He’s a scholar, one able to summon an incredible mental music library of names, songs, facts and dates off the top of his head. He’s a musician and a performer, bringing banjo and traditional folk music across the nation in one-man shows. He’s a writer, crafting the book "The Beautiful Music All Around Us" as well as the Grammy-nominated liner notes for the album "Banjo Diary."

Arguably his most prominent role, however, is as a kind of musical detective, uncovering a nation’s musical history that’s very much alive and very often hiding in plain sight.

"That’s a fun concept," Wade joked. "I’m not sure that Mickey Spillane and Stephen Wade are bedfellows."

Wade – humble about his work and knowledge despite its vast and encyclopedic size – would likely simply call his investigations research. The word, however, falls short of capturing his work, which started with Library of Congress field music recordings from the ’30s and ’40s and quickly branched out into investigating leads and travelling the country for the past several decades. The process resulted in interviewing hundreds of seemingly everyday subjects, uncovering the stories of the witnesses and participants behind building the secret bedrock of American folk music.

"I had to look as hard and as best as I could," Wade said. "I spent years at it, trying to learn about these persons’ and families’ songs – neither of which had been particularly documented in other books or anything like that. I had to actually go to raw materials or find the people themselves. I had to just get as close as I possibly could, and often I was really rewarded by surprises."

Wade turned those historical journeys and surprises, and compiled them into the book "The Beautiful Music All Around Us," which he’s now adapted into a stage production of the same name. The show is now coming to the Milwaukee Rep, beginning Friday, Jan. 16 and running through the middle of March.

The closest thing Wade has to a script for the show is 504 pages long and weighs three and a half pounds: the book itself. Transforming and translating it into a stage show, however, is a task requiring the author and performer to trim down the knowledge gathered and accumulated from decades of research, about 200 people interviewed, 900 pages of original book draft copy and 600 photos into a stage show fit for two or three hours.

"I have an outline in my mind that I keep improving and reacting to and exploring," Wade said. "I have a structure and ideas that I revolve around it and connect. I’m not telling what’s exactly in the book; it’s what’s in it, but also what’s around it and behind it too. My biggest problem is time. I have to get off the stage because they eventually have to close the doors."

Part of the reason for the loose, constantly developing state of "The Beautiful Music All Around Us" is that Wade likes to incorporate localized stories and excursions into the show. On some level, these little surprises and moments guarantee every city will experience a different production, "using the very notion of the book’s title as one organizing principle" according to Wade.

In Milwaukee’s case, the upcoming Rep productions will include brief, passing references into long-forgotten Milwaukee music locales and an interesting connection between radio singer Doc Hopkins – Wade's old teacher's teacher – and a Wisconsin music legend.

"My focus isn’t upper Midwest or Milwaukee music per say, but the fact is the presence and the evidence is there," Wade said.  

The meat of the "The Beautiful Music All Around Us," however, are the stories from the book, a compilation of decades worth of work, investigation and research. His interest in music’s origins first began as a kid growing up in the city of Chicago, long before he checked out the Library of Congress’ field recordings.

"As a kid, I was encountering players who’d come there via the Great Migration: black players, white players, hillbilly players like from Kentucky and stuff," Wade recalled. "I had seen people, and even more, I saw the larger environments: people in churches singing, people in bars listening to Muddy Waters play. It wasn’t just the performers; it was also the reception to them."

He also had his teacher, Fleming Brown, and Hopkins, who together helped teach Wade about the music, traditions and origins of folk – and somewhat inadvertently about how music travels and transforms through generations. A passion and an interest were born, sending Wade on his historical quest, one that often brought him face-to-face with American folk history and traditions long left behind and overlooked.

In one case, Wade was investigating the origins of the railroad booster song "Rock Island Line." He’d done as much digging as possible – from travelling the length of the Rock Island Line to listening to all of the various recordings available to interviewing people – but hadn’t found the key to unlock the song’s story. But then, searching through boxes of old, tiny type railroad magazines, he found the closest thing to folklorist gold: the original song, along with the names of the original singer, performers and the date.

"This was four years before the song got recorded, so by the time the song got recorded, it was improved," Wade noted. "The details in the original were dropped away, and it was more universalized. It was simpler, but it was the same song. It was amazing. I couldn’t believe I was looking at this thing. I tried calling my editor on a touchtone phone – this was before cell phones – and it took me three times to dial because my hands were shaking."

The discovery awoke Wade’s memory of the time he met with the older brother of the singer who recorded a rendition of the railroad booster song back in 1934 at Arkansas State Prison. The older brother had to sign an agreement to allow Wade to tape and publish the material. The man was rather ill at the time, so his wife signed the agreement for him, but as she made the necessary marks on the form, he touched her finger.

"In that moment, the spiritual and the commercial met – this allowed the record to come out for the Treasury album," Wade said. "In essence, it was echoing exactly the same thing the song was back earlier, because it was a quartet song sung in a church in 1929 serving both a spiritual purpose and a commercial purpose."

To further the song’s echoing impact, Wade noted John, Paul and George of The Beatles each noted that "Rock Island Line" played a significant role in making them want to play.

In another investigation, he met Isaac Shipp, whose sisters were behind a recording of "Sea Lion Woman" – a song they learned from him. In Wade’s meeting with Shipp – 50 years after the recording’s performance – the researcher remembers him saying, "I always knew that day would come to some good." The moment serves a demonstration of Wade’s two-fold mission, one personal and historical.

"So many people I’ve written about were in sense larger anonymous individuals except within their families," Wade said. "That’s been the most important, significant part with these families: bringing the book back home. There are moral obligations all over the place. The families wanted their parents or siblings remembered in as clear a light as possible, so often these are stories with a great deal of pain and complexity in their lives, just like anybody."

"Now, as this senior scholar and my role at universities and teaching, it’s just wonderful to share it with people younger than me," he continued.

Even after all of his work, time and research put into "The Beautiful Music All Around Us," however, Wade’s nowhere near finished digging through the living fossils of folk music, hoping to find out even more about the nation, its music and, most importantly, its people.

"The research never ends," Wade said. "There’s constant improvement, and knowledge accrues, so no matter what you learn, there’s still more. Even if I found that critical mass in each story that I was looking for or feeling, that doesn’t mean that’s the end of all. These songs have great lives, and they continue to renew and find other settings and interpreters and courses they follow."

It seems even when the curtain comes down, a music detective’s show still goes on.