This book explores the formation and continuance of Nashville, Tennessee as a music place, the importance of the fans (tourists) in creating Nashville's multifaceted musical identity, and the music and city's influence on the formation and performance of the individual and collective identities of the country-music fan. More importantly, the author discusses the larger issue of country music as a signifier of tradition suggesting that for many visitors, the music serves as a soundtrack, while Nashville serves as a performative space that permits the creation, performance, and remembrance of not only the country-music tradition, but also various individual and collective traditions and an idealized American identity. Through the theatrics of tourism, Nashville and its connection to country music are performed daily, reinforced through the sound and landscape of country music. Performing Nashville will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including tourism studies, leisure studies, ethnomusicology, sociology, folklore and anthropology.

The American singer and guitarist Ramblin' Jack Elliott (1931- ) is a seminal figure in the folk music revivals of the United States and Great Britain. Declared an American treasure by former President Bill Clinton, Elliott has traveled and performed for more than 50 years, and his life and career neatly parallel the ascension of folk music's "renaissance" from the 1940s through the present day. Ramblin' Jack Elliott: The Never-Ending Highway is the first complete biography of this important figure in the history of folk music. Elliott's music and Beat-era sensibility influenced countless artists in the fields of folk, rock, and country and western music, and Hank Reineke provides the full story of Elliott's relationships and influences. Most notably, his associations with Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan are well-documented: Elliott is considered Guthrie's most famous protege and Elliott mentored Dylan in his early career. Reineke also recounts how Elliott's life intersected with Derroll Adams, Jack Kerouac and the Beats, Princess Margaret, James Dean, and scores of others. The book examines the full breadth of Elliott's career, discussing how the rough-edged cowboy singer survived in the music industry and eventually won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Recording and the prestigious National Medal of the Arts. In addition to the biography, Reineke has amassed the first exhaustive and comprehensive discography of albums from the singer's notable back-catalog (1955-2009), including nearly 60 LP and CD issues, many rare and sought-after 78rpm discs, EPs, and 45rpm recordings, as well as a number of contributions to compilations, soundtracks, festival recordings, and guest appearances. This impressive volume is rounded out with a bibliography, an index, and more than 30 photographs, making this a must-have for scholars and fans of American folk music."

Offers a brief description of the life and career of the popular country and western singer, and includes interviews and an evaluation of Williams' music.

In a recent poll (Harris 1996), the Statler Brothers, country and gospel music legends, were rated second only to Frank Sinatra as America's favorite singers. They are known as the most awarded act in the history of country music and are still going strong after 30 years. Their performances and the songs they write reflect where they were born--in the birthplace of gospel music, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Presented here in a clear format are the expected discography details plus additional information that Statler fans will find fun to read.

This work contains the usual session and release information, single and album chart histories, television programs, awards, and indices for song titles, composers, and musicians plus extras such as album notes and Statler proverbs. This is a well-researched, documented, and concise work suitable for scholars and fans alike.

The definitive biography of country legend Merle Haggard by the New York Times bestselling biographer of Clint Eastwood, Cary Grant, The Eagles, and more.Merle Haggard was one of the most important country music musicians who ever lived. His astonishing musical career stretched across the second half of the 20th Century and into the first two decades of the next, during which he released an extraordinary 63 albums, 38 that made it on to Billboard's Country Top Ten, 13 that went to #1, and 37 #1 hit singles. With his ample songbook, unique singing voice and brilliant phrasing that illuminated his uncompromising commitment to individual freedom, cut with the monkey of personal despair on his back and a chip the size of Monument Valley on his shoulder, Merle's music and his extraordinary charisma helped change the look, the sound, and the fury of American music.The Hag tells, without compromise, the extraordinary life of Merle Haggard, augmented by deep secondary research, sharp detail and ample anecdotal material that biographer Marc Eliot is known for, and enriched and deepened by over 100 new and far-ranging interviews. It explores the uniquely American life of an angry rebellious boy from the wrong side of the tracks bound for a life of crime and a permanent home in a penitentiary, who found redemption through the music of "the common man."Merle Haggard's story is a great American saga of a man who lifted himself out of poverty, oppression, loss and wanderlust, to catapult himself into the pantheon of American artists admired around the world. Eliot has interviewed more than 100 people who knew Haggard, worked with him, were influenced by him, loved him or hated him. The book celebrates the accomplishments and explore the singer's infamous dark side: the self-created turmoil that expressed itself through drugs, women, booze, and betrayal. The Hag offers a richly anecdotal narrative that will elevate the life and work of Merle Haggard to where both properly belong, in the pantheon of American music and letters.The Hag is the definitive account of this unique American original, and will speak to readers of country music and rock biographies alike.

The beautiful and tragic saga of the Louvin Brothers - one of the most legendary country duos of all time - is one of America's great untold stories. Charlie Louvin was a good, god-fearing, churchgoing singer, but his brother Ira had the devil in him and was known for smashing his mandolin to splinters onstage, cussing out Elvis Presley, and trying to strangle his third wife with a telephone cord. "Satan is Real" is the incredible tale of Charlie Louvin's sixty-five-year career, the timeless murder ballads of the Louvin Brothers, and the epic tale of two brothers bound together by love, hate, alcohol, blood, and music.

In the nearly eight decades since his death from tuberculosis at age thirty-five, singer-songwriter Jimmie Rodgers has been an inspiration for numerous top performers--from Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Bill Monroe and Hank Williams to Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, and Beck. How did this Mississippi-born vaudevillian, a former railroad worker who performed so briefly so long ago, produce tones, tunes, and themes that have had such broad influence and made him the model for the way American roots music stars could become popular heroes?
In Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, the first book to explore the deep legacy of "The Singing Brakeman" from a twenty-first century perspective, Barry Mazor offers a lively look at Rodgers' career, tracing his rise from working-class obscurity to the pinnacle of renown that came with such hits as "Blue Yodel" and "In the Jailhouse Now." As Mazor shows, Rodgers brought emotional clarity and a unique sense of narrative drama to every song he performed, whether tough or sentimental, comic or sad. His wistful singing, falsetto yodels, bold flat-picking guitar style, and sometimes censorable themes---sex, crime, and other edgy topics--set him apart from most of his contemporaries. But more than anything else, Mazor suggests, it was Rodgers' shape-shifting ability to assume many public personas--working stiff, decked-out cowboy, suave ladies' man--that connected him to such a broad public and set the stage for the stars who followed him.
Mazor goes beyond Rodgers's own life to map the varied places his music has gone, forever changing not just country music but also rock and roll, blues, jazz, bluegrass, Western, commercial folk, and muchmore. In reconstructing this far-flung legacy, Mazor enables readers to meet Rodgers and his music anew--not as an historical figure, but as a vibrant, immediate force.

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

Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier presents essays from both film studies scholars and musicologists on core issues in western film scores: their history, their generic conventions, their operation as part of a narrative system, their functioning within individual filmic texts and their ideological import, especially in terms of the western 's construction of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. The Hollywood western is marked as uniquely American by its geographic setting, prototypical male protagonist and core American values. Music in the Western examines these conventions and the scores that have shaped them. But the western also had a resounding international impact, from Europe to Asia, and this volume distinguishes itself by its careful consideration of music in non-Hollywood westerns, such as Ravenous and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and in the easterns which influenced them, such as Yojimbo. Other films discussed include Wagon Master, High Noon, Calamity Jane, The Big Country, The Unforgiven, Dead Man, Wild Bill, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.

Contributors

Ross Care
Corey K. Creekmur
Yuna de Lannoy
K. J. Donnelly
Caryl Flinn
Claudia Gorbman
Kathryn Kalinak
Charles Leinberger
Matthew McDonald
Peter Stanfield
Mariana Whitmer
Ben Winters

The Routledge Music and Screen Media Series offers edited collections of original essays on music in particular genres of cinema, television, video games and new media. These edited essay collections are written for an interdisciplinary audience of students and scholars of music and film and media studies.

"Voices of the Country" presents interviews with innovative musicians, producers, and songwriters who shaped the last 50 years of country music. From Eddy Arnold's new, smoother approach to song delivery to Loretta Lynn's take-no-prisoners feminism, these people opened new vistas in country music and American culture. Each has a unique, individual voice, including Chet Atkins's self-effacing modesty, Lynn's audacious storytelling, Charley Pride's proud knowledge of his landmark status as among the only African-Americans to break through country's racial barrier, and Sheb Wooley's optimism that "dreams will come true" - if you only choose the right goals. "Voices of the Country" will appeal to all fans of country music and the American scene that nurtured it.

Nevermind, Achtung Baby, Use Your Illusion 1&2 - the 90s saw some classic albums produced by artists such as Nirvana, U2, Gun n' Roses and Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as a resurgence in country music popularized by Shania Twain and Garth Brooks. Combining information from both the US and UK charts provided by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and British Phonographic Industry (BPI), 100 Best Selling Albums of the 90s features chart-topping work from Michael Jackson, Puff Daddy and Green Day. Each album entry is accompanied by the original sleeve artwork - front and back - and is packed full of facts and recording information, including a complete track listing, musician and production credits, and an authoritative commentary on the record and its place in cultural history. Soundtracks featured include the 60s and 70s hits on Forrest Gump, the Elton John/Tim Rice songs in The Lion King, and the orchestral score for Titanic (and Celine Dion's Oscar-winning My Heart Will Go On). Other stand-out albums include the Eagles' reforming to make Hell Freezes Over and Eric Clapton's Unplugged, a career revival for him in the popular 90s back-to-basics semi-acoustic series. With vinyl sales now at their highest in 25 years, 100 Best Selling Albums of the 90s is an expert celebration of popular music from Sheryl Crow to Shania Twain, from the Spice Girls to the Backstreet Boys, from Gloria Estefan to Michael Jackson to Lauryn Hill.

George Jones' nearly 60-year recording and performing career has had a profound influence on modern country music and influenced a younger generation of singers, including Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Randy Travis, Tim McGraw, and Trace Adkins. As Merle Haggard said of Jones in Rolling Stone magazine, His voice was like a Stradivarius violin: one of the greatest instruments ever made. Jones' saga is a larger-than-life tale of rags to riches and back to rags again. He was born into near poverty in a backwater patch of East Texas. His formal education ended early; by his early teens, he was singing on the streets of Beaumont, Texas, for tips. After beginning to record in the mid-1950s Jones became, by sheer dint of his vocal prowess, one of Nashville's most celebrated honky-tonk singers. But from the start, Jones' life, as often reflected in his music, was shaped by misdirection, chaos, turmoil, and emotional strife aggravated by a ferocious appetite for alcohol. Fame and adulation seemed to merely intensify his personal travails. Jones' story has a relatively happy ending. With the help of fourth wife Nancy during the final decade and a half of his life, he got clean and sober, was feted as a much-revered elder statesman for the music, and, by most accounts, found peace of mind at long last.

Soul music and country music propel American popular culture. Using ethnomusicological tools, Shonekan examines their socio-cultural influences and consequences: the perception of and resistance to hegemonic structures from within their respective constituencies, the definition of national identity, and the understanding of the 'American Dream.'

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.

On New Year's Day 1953, Hank Williams-numbed by a deadly combination of whiskey and narcotics-died in the back seat of his Cadillac en route to a performance in Canton, Ohio. He was only twenty nine years old at the time of his death and his passing appeared to bring his rags-to-riches success and destructive lifestyle to an abrupt end. Few figures before or since have cast as long or as broad a shadow over American popular music. Today, Hank Williams is considered by many to be the greatest singer and songwriter in the history of country music, and it is the combination of his remarkable musical achievements, his tumultuous personal life, and his tragic and still-mysterious demise that make him such a compelling historical figure. As volume demonstrates, Williams's death was the beginning of an equally gripping second act: for more than sixty years, an ever-lengthening parade of journalists, family and friends, musical contemporaries, biographers, historians and scholars, fans, and novelists have attempted to capture in words the man, the artist, and the legend. The Hank Williams Reader, the first book of its kind devoted to this giant of American music, collects more than sixty of the most compelling, insightful, and historically significant of these writings. The selections cover a broad assortment of themes and perspectives, ranging from heartfelt reminiscences and shocking tabloid exposes to thoughtful meditations and critical essays. Featured authors include Hank Williams, Jr., Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, David Halberstam, Greil Marcus, Rick Bragg, and Lee Smith, to name but a few. The Hank Williams Reader also features a lengthy interpretive introduction and the most extensive bibliography of Williams-related writings ever published. Over time, writers have sought to explain Williams in a variety of ways, and in tracing these shifting interpretations, this anthology chronicles his cultural transfiguration from star-crossed hillbilly singer to enduring American icon.

(Easy Guitar). A jam-packed collection of 100 country classics arranged for beginning-level guitarists. Includes: Achy Breaky Heart (Don't Tell My Heart) * All the Gold in California * Could I Have This Dance * Coward of the County * Down at the Twist and Shout * Folsom Prison Blues * He Stopped Loving Her Today * Jambalaya * Lucille * On the Road Again * Rocky Top * Walkin' After Midnight * Wichita Lineman * and more.

When the story of banjo superstar Earl Scruggs is told, the rich musical environment that produced him is often ignored. During his lifetime Scruggs spun a creation myth around his playing, convincing many that he was the sole originator of a three-finger, up-picking, banjo style. For the first time, this book tells the full story of the music and musicians of the western Carolinas that influenced Earl Scruggs. Based on more than 15 years of in-depth research, this book includes the story of country music recording pioneers Parker and Woolbright, Fisher Hendley and Martin Melody Boys; rare images of area music makers; and the history and development of fiddlers' conventions and radio barn dances. Together, these stories are woven into the biographies of Earl's mentors to reveal the musical atmosphere in which they developed the "three-finger picking" style that so enchanted a young Earl Scruggs.

Dust off the banjo and tune up the fiddle! From Jimmy Rodgers and the Grand Ole Opry to Hank Williams and Honky Tonk, this book takes its readers on a twangy tour of one of the oldest and most popular musical genres in America. Country music lovers and historians alike will devour more than 400 questions, beginning with the roots of vaudeville, blues and church music all the way to 1960s Nashville.