Massively popular for the past century, country music has often been associated with political and social conservatism. While such figures as George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ted Cruz have embraced and even laid claim to this musical genre over the years, country performers have long expressed bold and progressive positions on a variety of public issues, whether through song lyrics, activism, or performance style. Bringing together a wide spectrum of cultural critics, The Honky Tonk on the Left takes on this conservative stereotype and reveals how progressive thought has permeated country music from its beginnings to the present day. The original essays in this collection analyze how diverse performers, including Fiddlin' John Carson, Webb Pierce, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, O. B. McClinton, Garth Brooks, and Uncle Tupelo, have taken on such issues as government policies, gender roles, civil rights, prison reform, and labor unrest. Taking notice of the wrongs in their eras, these musicians worked to address them in song and action, often with strong support from fans. In addition to the volume editor, this collection includes work by Gregory N. Reish, Peter La Chapelle, Stephanie Vander Wel, Charles L. Hughes, Ted Olson, Nadine Hubbs, Stephanie Shonekan, Stephen A. King, P. Renee Foster, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Travis D. Stimeling, and Jonathan Silverman.

American roots music, also known as Americana music, can be challenging to categorize, spanning the genres of jazz, bluegrass, country, blues, rock and roll, and an assortment of variations in between. In The Downhome Sound, Mandi Bates Bailey explores the messages, artists, community, and appeal of this seemingly disparate musical collective. To understand the art form's intended meanings and typical audiences, she analyzes lyrics and interviews Americana artists, journalists, and festival organizers to uncover a desire for inclusion and diversity. Bailey also conducts an experiment to assess listener reception relative to more commercial forms of music. The result is an in-depth study of the political and cultural influence of Americana and its implications for social justice.

The country side of southern soul _______________________ In the American South, black and white musicians have been influencing each other's music for generations, from the hymns of the 18th century to the soul music of the 60s. Rock and roll was born in the South, spawned from the legendary blues artists who grew up there - but who were the people behind this remarkable cultural interplay, and how did they make their music in a time when oppressive racist laws and segregation were ubiquitous? Fascinated by the collision of country and soul music in the Southern States, renowned music journalist Barney Hoskyns and photographer Muir MacKean set out on a journey through the American South to explore the phenomenon of primarily black singers and primarily white musicians joining forces in the 1960s to create musical magic in an era of racial tension. Travelling from Memphis to Muscle Shoals to Nashville, Hoskyns and MacKean went in search of the artists behind the iconic music of the South, sitting down with dozens of the architects of what's come to be known as Country Soul. Uncovering never-before-heard details and wild stories of the music scenes that helped shape music as we know it today, they capture a story that is as inspiring as it is historically important.

With an iconic sound that transcends country, pop, rock, and blues, Rosanne Cash's voice and vision have captured American life for generations of fans. Over the same time span, internationally acclaimed artist Dan Rizzie has wowed collectors with his evocative paintings, prints, and collages. Now, in a book that is as unique as their artistry, Cash and her longtime friend Rizzie have teamed up to create an extraordinary hybrid. Blending images created by Rizzie with strands of lyrics from a variety of Cash's songs (including new material from her latest album, She Remembers Everything, as well as her beloved classics), Bird on a Blade is a mosaic designed to inspire the imagination and soothe the heart. Oscillating between periods of growth and times of darkness, Bird on a Blade reflects on life's mysteries. Powerful lines from songs such as "God Is in the Roses" from the 2006 album Black Cadillac evoke themes of mourning, with meditations on solitude. By turns, a verse of "Fire of the Newly Alive" from the 1993 album The Wheel celebrates passion and renewal. Working together, Cash and Rizzie selected some of his most vibrant paintings, collages, and drawings to complement the words, using geometric patterns, ornaments, and lush glimpses of nature, including Rizzie's signature bird imagery. The work of a harmonious duet, the fifty pairings in Cash and Rizzie's Bird on a Blade exude inspiration from cover to cover.

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.

A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022 A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022 Though frequently ignored by the music mainstream, queer and transgender country and Americana artists have made essential contributions as musicians, performers, songwriters, and producers. Queer Country blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of these artists and their work. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher delves into the careers of well-known lesbian artists like k.d. lang and Amy Ray and examines the unlikely success of singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, who found fame forty years after releasing the first out gay country album. She also focuses on later figures like nonbinary transgender musician Rae Spoon and renowned drag queen country artist Trixie Mattel; and on recent breakthrough artists like Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah, and chart-topping Grammy-winning phenomenon Lil Nas X. Many of these musicians place gender and sexuality front and center even as it complicates their careers. But their ongoing efforts have widened the circle of country/Americana by cultivating new audiences eager to connect with the artists' expansive music and personal identities. Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.

Bluegrass has found an unlikely home, and avid following, in the Czech Republic. The music's emergence in Central Europe places it within an increasingly global network of communities built around bluegrass activities. Lee Bidgood offers a fascinating study of the Czech bluegrass phenomenon that merges intimate immersion in the music with on-the-ground fieldwork informed by his life as a working musician. Drawing on his own close personal and professional interactions, Bidgood charts how Czech bluegrass put down roots and looks at its performance as a uniquely Czech musical practice. He also reflects on "Americanist" musical projects and the ways Czech musicians use them to construct personal and social identities. Bidgood sees these acts of construction as a response to the Czech Republic's postsocialist environment but also to US cultural prominence within our global mediascape.

With his trademark mandolin style and unequaled tenor harmonies, Curly Seckler has carved out a seventy-seven-year career in bluegrass and country music. His foundational work in Flatt and Scruggs's Foggy Mountain Boys secured him a place in bluegrass history, while his role in The Nashville Grass made him an essential part of the music's triumphant 1970s revival. Written in close collaboration with Mr. Seckler and those who know him, Foggy Mountain Troubadour is the first full-length biography of an American original. Penny Parsons follows a journey from North Carolina schoolhouses to the Grand Ole Opry stage and the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, from boarding houses to radio studios and traveling five to a car on two-lane roads to make the next show. Throughout, she captures the warm humor, hard choices, and vivid details of a brilliant artist's life as he criss-crosses a nation and a century making music.

Neil V. Rosenberg met the legendary Bill Monroe at the Brown County Jamboree. Rosenberg's subsequent experiences in Bean Blossom put his feet on the intertwined musical and scholarly paths that made him a preeminent scholar of bluegrass music. Rosenberg's memoir shines a light on the changing bluegrass scene of the early 1960s. Already a fan and aspiring musician, his appetite for banjo music quickly put him on the Jamboree stage. Rosenberg eventually played with Monroe and spent four months managing the Jamboree. Those heights gave him an eyewitness view of nothing less than bluegrass's emergence from the shadow of country music into its own distinct art form. As the likes of Bill Keith and Del McCoury played, Rosenberg watched Monroe begin to share a personal link to the music that tied audiences to its history and his life--and helped turn him into bluegrass's foundational figure. An intimate look at a transformative time, Bluegrass Generation tells the inside story of how an American musical tradition came to be.

Born in Texas and raised in Arizona Buck Owens eventually found his way to Bakersfield California. Unlike the vast majority of country singers songwriters and musicians who made their fortunes working and living in Nashville the often rebellious and always independent Owens chose to create his own brand of country music some 2 000 miles away from Music City a racking up a remarkable 21 number-one hits along the way. In the process he helped give birth to a new country sound and did more than any other individual to establish Bakersfield as a country music center.THIn the latter half of the 1990s Buck began working on his autobiography. Over the next few years he talked into the microphone of a cassette tape machine for nearly one hundred hours recording the story of his life. With his near-photographic memory Buck recalled everything from his early days wearing hand-me-down clothes in Texas to his glory years as the biggest country star of the 1960s; from his legendary Carnegie Hall concert to his multiple failed marriages; from his hilarious exploits on the road to the tragic loss of his musical partner and best friend Don Rich; from his days as the host of a local TV show in Tacoma Washington to his co-hosting the network television show EHee HawE; and from his comeback hit Streets of Bakersfield to his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.THIn these pages Buck also shows his astute business acumen having been among the first country artists to create his own music publishing company. He also tells of negotiating the return of all of his Capitol master recordings his acquisition of numerous radio stations and of his conceiving and building the Crystal Palace one of the most venerated musical venues in the country.

On January 13, 1968, Johnny Cash (1932-2003) took the stage at Folsom Prison in California. The concert and the live album, At Folsom Prison, propelled him to worldwide superstardom. He reached new Audiences, ignited tremendous growth in the country music industry, and connected with fans in a way no other artist has before or since. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece, Revised and Updated is a riveting account of that day, what led to it, and what followed. Michael Streissguth skillfully places the album and the concert in the larger context of Cash's artistic development, the era's popular music, and California's prison system, uncovering new angles and exploding a few myths along the way. Scrupulously researched, rich with the author's unprecedented archival access to Folsom Prison's and Columbia Records' archives, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison shows how Cash forever became a champion of the downtrodden, as well as one of the more enduring forces in American music. This revised edition includes new images and updates throughout the volume, including previously unpublished material.

Gay never recorded an album, never won a Juno. His music existed in the moment, appreciated by the few who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. For the rest of us, those late-night jam sessions in a shack in an alley on the bad side of Edmonton never happened. We never got to hear him play the Cole Porter songs he loved with Carlos Montoya, never got to watch the ashes build dangerously on the end of his menthol cigarette. And when Frank Gay died, only the guitar players gently wept. - Shelley Youngblut Until his death in 1982, Edmonton luthier and guitarist Frank Gay built guitars for several famous musicians, including country stars Johnny Cash, Don Gibson, Webb Pierce, and Hank Snow. He captivated listeners with his singular talent on guitar and other instruments, and was well known within the music industry. Trevor Harrison's detective work uncovers the story of this private, charming, and bohemian man, doing a tremendous service to Canadian culture and music history. Harrison pieces together Frank Gay's life through interviews with people who knew him and saw him play. Very few recordings of him playing exist, and the sparse accounts of Gay's life and work raise more questions than they answer. Musicians and instrument makers, as well as those interested in Canadian music or Edmonton's colourful past, will be fascinated by this biography of western Canadian luthier, musician, and guitar virtuoso Frank Gay.