Stephen Wade is a wonderful performer who recreates the experience of traditional folk music for us by employing showmanship in the finest sense of the word.

He is a student of the late Fleming Brown of Chicago who was committed to the study of the traditional folk five-string banjo and was doing it a lot earlier before this style became known as "old time" music. Fleming was Stephen's hero and mentor. Stephen Wade has kept alive Fleming's passion for the banjo playing folksingers of the South such as Buel Kazee, Roscoe Holcomb, Frank Profitt, Obray Ramsey, Rufus Crisp, Pete Steele, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Aunt Semantha Baumgartner, Clarence Ashley, Hobart Smith, Cousin Emmy, Stringbean, Brother Oswald, Uncle Dave Macon, Grandpa Jones, Tommy Jarrel, and many more who represent the Appalachian tradition of American Folk Music.

Frank Hamilton