The histories of baseball and country music ran in parallel tracks through most of the twentieth century. America's sport and America's music moved from the fringes to the mainstream, gaining exposure and building heroes, first via radio broadcasts and then on the television screen. Both evolved with American society through wartime, the Civil Rights movement, and into the age of multimillion dollar superstars. Don Cusic offers an engaging and insightful analysis that addresses race, gender, class, ethnicity, business practices and marketing, performance, media, and the cult of celebrity.

In this slim, lively book our foremost historian of country music recalls the lost worlds of pioneering fiddlers and pickers, balladeers and yodelers. As he looks at "hillbilly" music's pre-commercial era and its early popular growth through radio and recordings, Bill C. Malone shows us that it was a product not only of the British Isles but of diverse African, German, Spanish, French, and Mexican influences.

Hank Williams (1923--1953) is revered in the top tier of the country-music pantheon, and his forlorn ballads are classics in the country songbook. An inspired, natural genius, Williams was the complete country balladeer. Though he knew almost nothing about the technicalities of music, his plaintive songs--"Cold, Cold Heart," "Your Cheatin' Heart," and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"--affirm that he knew everything about its heart.

Williams was to country music what Elvis Presley was to rock 'n' roll. With his legend already firmly established, he was only twenty-nine when he died on New Year's Day 1953 (or, perhaps, New Year's Eve 1952) in the back seat of his baby-blue Cadillac on the way to a concert in Canton, Ohio. Interest in Williams is unflagging, and myths and tall tales about his life and death continue to grow with every passing year.

Although the fascinating trail of Williams's career has been a favorite subject for biographers, Hank Williams, So Lonesome winnows away the myths and hearsay while recounting this Alabama boy's blazing rise to stardom. This close look at Williams moves beyond other books by providing new research, evaluations, and interviews with friends, family, and band members. Of the many biographies this one comes closest to being truly accurate.

It focuses also upon the music itself, confirming that Williams was a natural songwriter and performer like none other. This new assessment analyzes the Williams legacy by reviewing both the printed and recorded music and by thorough exploration of the Williams bibliography and discography.

Bill Koon, a professor of English at Clemson University, is the editor of Classic Southern Humor.

The most atypical of bluegrass artists, Bill Clifton has enjoyed a long career as a recording artist, performer, and champion of old-time music. Bill C. Malone pens the story of Clifton's eclectic life and influential career. Born into a prominent Maryland family, Clifton connected with old-time music as a boy. Clifton made records around earning a Master's degree, fifteen years in the British folk scene, and stints in the Peace Corps and Marines. Yet that was just the beginning. Closely allied with the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, Mike Seeger, and others, Clifton altered our very perceptions of the music--organizing one of the first outdoor bluegrass festivals, publishing a book of folk and gospel standards that became a cornerstone of the folk revival, and introducing both traditional and progressive bluegrass around the world. As Malone shows, Clifton clothed the music of working-class people in the vestments of romance, celebrating the log cabin as a refuge from modernism that rang with the timeless music of Appalachia. An entertaining account by an eminent music historian, Bill Clifton clarifies the myths and illuminates the paradoxes of an amazing musical life.

Texas is the land of Stevie Ray Vaughn, Willie Nelson, Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Roy Orbison and Ornette Coleman. This publication covers all of these artists and more in this history of music in the Lone Star State.

Beginning with the musical cultures of the American South in the 1920s and 1930s, this title traces the genre through its pivotal developments during the era of Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys in the forties. It also describes early bluegrass' role in postwar country music, and its trials following the appearance of rock and roll.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the booming popularity of country music threw a spotlight on a new generation of innovative women artists. These individuals blazed trails as singers, musicians, and performers even as the industry hemmed in their potential popularity with labels like woman hillbilly, singing cowgirl, and honky-tonk angel.Stephanie Vander Wel looks at the careers of artists like Patsy Montana, Rose Maddox, and Kitty Wells against the backdrop of country music's golden age. Analyzing recordings and appearances on radio, film, and television, she connects performances to real and imagined places and examines how the music sparked new ways for women listeners to imagine the open range, the honky-tonk, and the home. The music also captured the tensions felt by women facing geographic disruption and economic uncertainty. While classic songs and heartfelt performances might ease anxieties, the subject matter underlined women's ambivalent relationships to industrialism, middle-class security, and established notions of femininity.

Dwight Yoakam has long been known to country music fans as a musiciam who is as much artist as he is superstar. Over the course of his fifteen-year career, he has received fourteen Grammy nominations. One reviewer described his work this way: "Yoakam's lyrics--Leonard Cohen meets Ernest Tubb--work so well because they're literary without being high-minded. The artfulness of the words . . . doesn't always hit you until you read them on the lyric sheet."Newsweek called Yoakam's most recent record--titled, like his book, A Long Way Home--"a daring departure. It's lush and languid, more introspective than hit-driven. He's looking for subtle emotions, melodic evocations of the distances between people, and he draws on sources as varied as Bobby Darin, Chet Baker, and Buck Owens to get there."A Long Way Home is the first collection of Yoakam's lyrics in book form. It spans his career, from such early albums as Hillbilly Deluxe and Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room to the recently released, critically acclaimed A Long Way Home. Yoakam's songwriting is really storytelling--he poetically writes of subjects ranging from God to drinking to love--and proves him to be as fine a writer as he is a musician.

Duncan McLean traveled from Orkney, Scotland, to Texas in search of the extraordinary mix of jazz, blues, country, and mariachi that is Western Swing. This account of his travels takes in barbed-wire museums, onion festivals, hoe-downs, ghost towns, dead dogs, and ten thousand miles of driving through the Lone Star State. A constant soundtrack of vintage music from bands like the Texas Top Hands, The Lightcrust Doughboys, and the Modern Mountaineers cheers McLean as he tries, with great difficulty, to track down any trace of his greatest heroes: Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

A cogent blueprint for the development of a "public philosophy" that integrates shared principles and values into our troubled social structure and articulates a consensus vision of society's future.

The continuing vitality of American thought stems, to a large extent, from the application of its historical roots embedded in contemporary problems and issues. Yet for some time the signal contributions of Josiah Royce (1855-1916) have been overlooked in the formulation and shaping of critical areas of public policy. In this brilliantly articulated new book, ethicist Jacquelyn Kegley carefully explicates and enlarges the scope of Roycean thought and shows that Royce's views on public philosophy have direct and valuable application to current social problems.

Working from the assumption that issues of family, education, and health care are not merely exigent political tempests but areas of genuine, long-lasting concern, Kegley opens fresh perspectives on Royce's philosophy by introducing and applying his ideas to discussions of how we care for ourselves and our society today. She analyzes Roycean criteria that can be successfully used to nourish developmental stages within families, promote intellectual and social growth in schooling and scholarship, and sustain physical and mental well-being throughout the life cycle.

"Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities" should be a springboard for the reassessment of contemporary public policy and the reapplication of the American philosophical legacy to current issues and decisions. Kegley's work serves as a solid contribution both to public philosophy and to the continued vitality of American thought, and it extends the range of both.

Since its beginnings in the 1920s, country music has soared beyond an almost exclusively regional audience to become America's most popular form in the 1990s. Seventy years of regional modernization have framed it for broad appeal in today's popular culture.

Here is a fascinating book that offers perspective on contemporary country music's stars, promoters, and fans. It probes deeply to learn how a vibrant country music culture evolved from rustic radio programs to become aggressive promotion of recording artists and an extended network of performers and fans unparalleled in other forms of popular music.

Drawing upon a remarkably diverse range of sources--literary and scholarly works, fan magazines and music business publications, biographies of country music stars, recordings, radio and television programs, and motion pictures--"Country Music Culture" is based on firsthand observations of more than seventy-five live concerts and public events. It provides impressive evidence of the boundless devotion an immense audience extends to its favorite music, a music that defines the culture that produced it.

This collection of essays examines modern country music in America, from its roots to today's music. Contributors look at aspects of the music as diverse as the creation of country culture in the honky tonk; the development of the Nashville music industry; and why country music singers are similar to the English romantic poets. Historians, sociologists, musicologists, folklorists, anthropologists, ethnographers, communication specialists, and journalists are all represented.

From his earliest recordings to his posthumously released albums, the haunting baritone of Waylon Jennings marked him as an extraordinarily individualistic country music artist. This biography by the late R. Serge Denisoff, first published in 1983, recounts Waylon's west Texas upbringing, his introduction to music as a radio announcer at thirteen years old, his tutelage by rock star Buddy Holly, and his eventual stellar yet stormy music career. Where the original 1983 biography ends, music scholar Travis Stimeling picks up with the waning years of Waylon's recording and performing. Stimeling recounts in the new afterword Waylon's continued musical success in the early 1980s-though his financial troubles and battle with drugs and alcohol would soon cost him both professionally and personally-his triumphant and sober return in the 1990s and collaboration with longtime recording artists in the industry, and his continued musical relevance in an evolving industry driven by Nashville's urban popularization of country music. Additionally, series editor Ted Olson, in his foreword, touches on Waylon's legacy and the continued influence of his outlaw style of country music. Fans of Waylon, country music, and the Nashville music scene are sure to find this second edition of R. Serge Denisoff's classic biography a welcome addition to the publications on the father of outlaw country.

A backstage audition led Mark Hembree into a five-year stint (1979-1984) as the bassist for Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. Hembree's journey included playing at the White House and on the acclaimed album Master of Bluegrass. But it also put him on a collision course with the rigors of touring, the mysteries of Southern culture, and the complex personality of bandleader-legend Bill Monroe. Whether it's figuring out the best time for breakfast (early) or for beating the boss at poker (never), Hembree gives readers an up-close look at the occasionally exalting, often unglamorous life of a touring musician in the sometimes baffling, always colorful company of a bluegrass icon. The amusing story of a Yankee fish out of water, On the Bus with Bill Monroe mixes memoir with storytelling to recount the adventures of a Northerner learning new ways and the Old South.

'Johnny Cash ... Every man could relate to him, no man could be him, and only one man could get inside his head - Robert Hilburn' BONO People don't just listen to Johnny Cash: they believe in him. But no one has told the Man in Black's full story, until now. In Johnny Cash: The Life, Robert Hilburn conveys the unvarnished truth about a musical icon, whose colourful career stretched from his days at Sun Records with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to his remarkable, brave and deeply moving 'Hurt' video, aged sixty-nine. As music critic for the Los Angeles Times, Hilburn knew Cash well throughout his life: he was the only music journalist at the legendary Folsom Prison concert in 1968, and he interviewed Cash and his wife June Carter for the final time just months before their deaths in 2003. Hilburn's rich reporting shows the remarkable highs and deep lows that followed and haunted Cash in equal measure. A man of great faith and humbling addiction, Cash aimed for more than another hit for the jukebox; he wanted his music to lift people's spirits. Drawing upon his personal experience with Cash and a trove of never-before-seen material from the singer's inner circle, Hilburn creates an utterly compelling, deeply human portrait of one of the most iconic figures in modern popular culture - not only a towering figure in country music, but also a seminal influence in rock, whose personal life was far more troubled, and whose musical and lyrical artistry much more profound, than even his most devoted fans ever realised.

In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America's most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics. In Hubbs's view, the popular phrase "I'll listen to anything but country" allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive "omnivore" musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how U.S. provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class. With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country's manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible. Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

"Proud to Be an Okie" brings to life the influential country music scene that flourished in and around Los Angeles from the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s to the early 1970s. The first work to fully illuminate the political and cultural aspects of this intriguing story, the book takes us from Woody Guthrie's radical hillbilly show on Depression-era radio to Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" in the late 1960s. It explores how these migrant musicians and their audiences came to gain a sense of identity through music and mass media, to embrace the New Deal, and to celebrate African American and Mexican American musical influences before turning toward a more conservative outlook. What emerges is a clear picture of how important Southern California was to country music and how country music helped shape the politics and culture of Southern California and of the nation.

In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America's most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics. In Hubbs's view, the popular phrase "I'll listen to anything but country" allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive "omnivore" musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how U.S. provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class. With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country's manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible. Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

Do you ever find yourself: Tumblin' out of bed and stumblin' to the kitchen? Searchin' for a cup of ambition? Sighin' and groanin' at the mundanity of life? We could all do with a bit more Dolly in our lives! With empowering advice on love, business, style and looking out for number one, these pages will help Dolly Parton lovers everywhere create the life they truly want.

Reviews and rates the best recordings of country artists and groups, provides biographies of the artists, and charts the evolution of country music.

At last, the authorized biography of Townes Van Zandt (1944-1997), who wrote such unforgettable songs as "Pancho & Lefty" and "If I Needed You." Born to a wealthy oil family in Ft. Worth, Texas, hounded by alcoholism and depression, Van Zandt pursued a nomadic existence following his muse, whatever the cost to himself, friends, and relatives. Based on exclusive interviews with those close to Van Zandt, including his best friend Guy Clark and colleagues like Steve Earle and John Prine, "To Live's to Fly" captures all the humor, hijinks, poetry, and heartbreak of this revered, "genuinely" outlaw country artist.

For many diehard music fans and critics, Oklahoma-born James Talley ranks among the finest of American singer-songwriters. Talley's unique style-a blend of folk, country, blues, and social commentary-draws comparisons with the likes of Woody Guthrie, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Cash. In this engaging, down-to-earth memoir, Talley recalls the highs and lows of his nearly fifty-year career in country music. Talley's story begins in the hardscrabble towns of eastern Oklahoma. As a young man, he witnessed poverty and despair and worked alongside ordinary Americans who struggled to make ends meet. He has never forgotten his Oklahoma roots. These experiences shaped Talley's artistic vision and inspired him to write his own songs. Eventually Talley landed in Nashville, where his first years included exciting brushes with fame but also bitter disappointments. As an early champion of social justice causes, his ideals did not fit neatly into Nashville's star-making machine. By his own admission, Talley at times made poor business decisions and trusted the wrong people. His relationship with the country music industry was-and still is-fraught, but he makes no apology for staying true to his core principles. Nashville City Blues offers hard-won wisdom for any aspiring artist motivated to work hard and handle whatever setbacks might follow. Readers will also gain valuable understanding about the country music industry and the inescapable links between commerce and artistry.

Recorded in 1949, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" changed the face of American music. Earl Scruggs's instrumental essentially transformed the folk culture that came before it while helping to energize bluegrass's entry into the mainstream in the 1960s. The song has become a gateway to bluegrass for musicians and fans alike as well as a happily inescapable track in film and television. Thomas Goldsmith explores the origins and influence of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" against the backdrop of Scruggs's legendary career. Interviews with Scruggs, his wife Louise, disciple Bela Fleck, and sidemen like Curly Seckler, Mac Wiseman, and Jerry Douglas shed light on topics like Scruggs's musical evolution and his working relationship with Bill Monroe. As Goldsmith shows, the captivating sound of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" helped bring back the banjo from obscurity and distinguished the low-key Scruggs as a principal figure in American acoustic music.Passionate and long overdue, Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown takes readers on an ear-opening journey into two minutes and forty-three seconds of heaven.

Contributions by Joshua Coleman, Christine Hand Jones, Kevin C. Neece, Charlotte Pence, George Plasketes, Jeffrey Scholes, Jeff Sellars, Toby Thompson, and Jude Warne After performing with Ronnie Hawkins as the Hawks (1957-1964), The Band (Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, and Levon Helm) eventually rose to fame in the sixties as backing musicians for Bob Dylan. This collaboration with Dylan presented the group with a chance to expand musically and strike out on their own. The Band's fusion of rock, country, soul, and blues music-all tinged with a southern flavor and musical adventurousness-created a unique soundscape. The combined use of multiple instruments, complex song structures, and poetic lyrics required attentive listening and a sophisticated interpretive framework. It is no surprise, then, that they soon grew to be one of the biggest bands of their era. In Rags and Bones: An Exploration of The Band, scholars and musicians take a broad, multidisciplinary approach to The Band and their music, allowing for examination through sociological, historical, political, religious, technological, cultural, and philosophical means. Each contributor approaches The Band from their field of interest, offering a wide range of investigations into The Band's music and influence. Commercially successful and critically lauded, The Band created a paradoxically mythic and hauntingly realistic lyrical landscape for their songs-and their musicianship enlarged this detailed landscape. This collection offers a rounded examination, allowing the multifaceted music and work of The Band to be appreciated by audiences old and new.

Country is the most popular musical genre in America, because the songs speak to the common themes in American life - love, heartache, family, and country. This cleverly packaged tribute to country music features wisdom from singers like Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, and George Strait, along with illustrations from the Nashville institution Hatch Show Prints to showcase the universal truths found in these classic songs.