Other people locked themselves away and hid from their demons. Townes flung open his door and said 'Come on in.' So writes Harold Eggers Townes Van Zandt's longtime road manager and producer in EMy Years with Townes Van Zandt: Music Genius and RageE a a gripping memoir revealing the inner core of an enigmatic troubadour whose deeply poetic music was a source of inspiration and healing for millions but was for himself a torment struggling for dominance among myriad personal demons.THTownes Van Zandt often stated that his main musical mission was to write the perfect song that would save someone's life. However his life was a work in progress he was constantly struggling to shape and comprehend. Eggers says of his close friend and business partner that like the master song craftsman he was he was never truly satisfied with the final product but always kept giving it one more shot one extra tweak one last effort. THA vivid firsthand account exploring the source of the singer's prodigious talent widespread influence and relentless path toward self-destruction EMy Years with Townes Van ZandtE presents the truth of that all-consuming artistic journey told by a close friend watching it unfold.

A musical genre forever outside the lines With a claim on artists from Jimmie Rodgers to Jason Isbell, Americana can be hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. John Milward's Americanaland is filled with the enduring performers and vivid stories that are at the heart of Americana. At base a hybrid of rock and country, Americana is also infused with folk, blues, R&B, bluegrass, and other types of roots music. Performers like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Gram Parsons used these ingredients to create influential music that took well-established genres down exciting new roads. The name Americana was coined in the 1990s to describe similarly inclined artists like Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Wilco. Today, Brandi Carlile and I'm With Her are among the musicians carrying the genre into the twenty-first century. Essential and engaging, Americanaland chronicles the evolution and resonance of this ever-changing amalgam of American music. Margie Greve's hand-embroidered color portraits offer a portfolio of the pioneers and contemporary practitioners of Americana.

Inspired by the Hank Williams and Leadbelly recordings he heard as a teenager growing up outside of Boston, Jim Rooney began a musical journey that intersected with some of the biggest names in American music including Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Bill Monroe, Muddy Waters, and Alison Krauss. "In It for the Long Run: A Musical Odyssey" is Rooney's kaleidoscopic first-hand account of more than five decades of success as a performer, concert promoter, songwriter, music publisher, engineer, and record producer.
As witness to and participant in over a half century of music history, Rooney provides a sophisticated window into American vernacular music. Following his stint as a "Hayloft Jamboree" hillbilly singer in the mid-1950s, Rooney managed Cambridge's Club 47, a catalyst of the '60's folk music boom. He soon moved to the Newport Folk Festival as talent coordinator and director where he had a front row seat to Dylan "going electric."
In the 1970s Rooney's odyssey continued in Nashville where he began engineering and producing records. His work helped alternative country music gain a foothold in Music City and culminated in Grammy nominations for singer-songwriters John Prine, Iris Dement, and Nanci Griffith. Later in his career he was a key link connecting Nashville to Ireland's folk music scene.
Writing songs or writing his memoir, Jim Rooney is the consummate storyteller. "In It for the Long Run: A Musical Odyssey" is his singular chronicle from the heart of Americana.

'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.

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.

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.

With roots in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans, the Piedmont, Memphis, and the prairies of Texas and the American West, the musical genre called Americana can prove difficult to define. Nevertheless, this burgeoning trend in American popular music continues to expand and develop, winning new audiences and engendering fresh, innovative artists at an exponential rate. As Lee Zimmerman illustrates in Americana Music: Voices, Visionaries, and Pioneers of an Honest Sound, "Americana" covers a gamut of sounds and styles. In its strictest sense, it is a blanket term for bluegrass, country, mountain music, rockabilly, and the blues. By a broader definition, it can encompass roots rock, country rock, singer/songwriters, R&B, and their various combinations. Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Carl Perkins, and Tom Petty can all lay valid claims as purveyors of Americana, but so can Elvis Costello, Solomon Burke, and Jason Isbell. Americana is new and old, classic and contemporary, trendy and traditional. Mining the firsthand insights of those whose stories help shape the sound-people such as Ralph Stanley, John McEuen (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), Chris Hillman (Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers), Paul Cotton and Rusty Young (Poco), Shawn Colvin, Kinky Friedman, David Bromberg, the Avett Brothers, Amanda Shires, Ruthie Foster, and many more-Americana Music provides a history of how Americana originated, how it reached a broader audience in the '60s and '70s with the merging of rock and country, and how it evolved its overwhelmingly populist appeal as it entered the new millennium.

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.

Billy Joe Shaver wrote ten of the eleven songs included on Waylon Jennings's landmark album Honky Tonk Heroes and played a dominant role in the origins and development of the Outlaw Country movement of the 1970s. He has been named by Ray Wylie Hubbard, alongside Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, as a member of the 'holy trinity' of Texas songwriters. He has exerted a Texas-sized influence on Texas music and especially Texas singer-songwriters, and is cited as a chief inspiration by at least two generations of artists. But although his influence has been profound, Shaver has the dubious honor of becoming, according to author Courtney S. Lennon, 'country music's unsung hero.'In Live Forever: The Songwriting Legacy of Billy Joe Shaver, Lennon seeks to give Shaver the recognition his prolific output deserves. She unfolds for readers the complexity and the simplicity of the artist who wrote the songs that Brian T. Atkinson, in his foreword, calls 'peaceful and pure, complex and convoluted, mad and merciful' - the musician who wrote 'You Just Can't Beat Jesus Christ' and 'That's What She Said Last Night,' 'Honky Tonk Heroes,' and 'Get Thee Behind Me Satan.' Based on in-depth interviews with Shaver and a host of notable singer-songwriters, this book reveals and celebrates the saint and the sinner, the earthy intellectual and the hard-drinking commoner, the poet and the cowboy.