Click here to listen to Wade Ward playing “Chilly Winds”
“Uncle Wade” as he was known to his friends and neighbors was born on Saddle Creek, just outside of Independence, VA. on October 15, 1892 and lived in his beloved Blue Ridge mountains of Grayson County all of his life. He dedicated his incredible energy to performing and preserving the music of the region and to selflessly teaching a young generation of “folkies” his authentic style of banjo playing. Some say that in his own way, Uncle Wade was as influential to traditional American banjo as Earl Scruggs was to bluegrass.
Uncle Wade came by his love of Grayson County and his love of mountain music naturally, maybe even genetically. The Ward family were early settlers in the Saddle Creek area, just outside of Independence, and brought their musical influences with them to the mountains.
Wade’s father played music some and his mother often sang the mountain ballads. However, it was hearing his oldest brother, Davy Crockett Ward, play the fiddle that drew Wade towards the dance music of the mountains. “Crockett” as he was known, was 20 years older than Wade and was already fiddling at dances when Wade was born.
When Wade was 10, his father purchased a small farm on Peach Bottom Creek on the other side of Independence from where they had lived. This afforded Wade with a grand place to romp through the mountain meadows, to play in the creek and to sit on the porch with his brother and learn to play the banjo. By age 11, Wade was already accompanying his brother to play at local affairs. At age 16, having mastered his own local style of clawhammer banjo, Wade added fiddling to his musical abilities and by age 18 he was playing almost nightly at weddings, dances, school house meetings, corn shuckings and Christmas parties in Grayson and Carroll counties.
Over the next two and a half decades the Bogtrotters, Wade’s band, roamed the mountains playing for all sorts of events, including auctions, dances and festivals. Their performance at the 1932 -35 Whitetop Folk Festivals up on Virginia’s second highest mountain brought them international acclaim. Wade’s pure, clear and concise banjo playing soon gained the attention of folklorists and during the next 30 years folks like Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Peter Hoover, John Cohen and Ralph Rinzler came to record his music.
In the 1930’s and 40’s Wade and the Bogtrotters repeatedly placed in or won the Galax Fiddler’s convention. In 1940, the Bogtrotters traveled to Roanoke to be broadcast on an international radio show called “American School of the Air” produced by CBS. The sensational result of the broadcast is that the Bogtrotters gained an international following and young musicians began to travel to the Peach Bottom farm to learn the Wade Ward style of play.
Wade died in March of 1971 at the age of 79. He had never really traveled outside of the mountains until he was coaxed by the staff to attend the Smithsonian Folklife Festival at the age of 75. He enjoyed the event so much he attended the next three years. His playing lives on. He left hours of recordings, and hundreds of followers who learned from him.
