In the sound of the 1960s and 1970s, nothing symbolized the rift between black and white America better than the seemingly divided genres of country and soul. Yet the music emerged from the same songwriters, musicians, and producers in the recording studios of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama--what Charles L. Hughes calls the ""country-soul triangle."" In legendary studios like Stax and FAME, integrated groups of musicians like Booker T. and the MGs and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section produced music that both challenged and reconfirmed racial divisions in the United States. Working with artists from Aretha Franklin to Willie Nelson, these musicians became crucial contributors to the era's popular music and internationally recognized symbols of American racial politics in the turbulent years of civil rights protests, Black Power, and white backlash. Hughes offers a provocative reinterpretation of this key moment in American popular music and challenges the conventional wisdom about the racial politics of southern studios and the music that emerged from them. Drawing on interviews and rarely used archives, Hughes brings to life the daily world of session musicians, producers, and songwriters at the heart of the country and soul scenes. In doing so, he shows how the country-soul triangle gave birth to new ways of thinking about music, race, labor, and the South in this pivotal period.

In 1908 a local rancher and surveyor by the name of N Howard 'Jack' Thorp walked into the cramped offices of the Estancia News in Estancia, New Mexico, and inquired of the printer about publishing a small book of 'cowboy songs'. For at least nineteen years, Thorp had sought out cowboy ballads and poems from across the west -- from New Mexico and Texas to Wyoming and Utah, and had written a few ditties himself. The finished volume, printed for just six cents a copy, included twenty-three songs and was the first book published devoted exclusively to cowboy songs. Thorp is recognised for being the first person to take a serious interest in collecting and preserving the ballads penned by ranchers to calm cattle on the range. This new edition of an oft-reprinted classic features an essay by western historian and musician Mark Gardner, and line illustrations by noted western artists and rancher Ron Kil. Included with the book is a CD of a recording of a selection of songs and poems taken from both the original 1908 edition and 1921 expanded second edition. In their renditions, Gardner and Rex Rideout recreate the historic music preserved by Thorp with vintage instruments and authentic styles.

Combining the history of country music's roots with portraits of its primary performers, this text examines the relationship between 'America's truest music' and the working-class culture that has constituted its principal source, nurtured its development, and provided its most dedicated supporters.

Singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson has maintained a career in music and film for more than forty years. He was the oldest son in a military family that planned for him to continue the tradition of military service, but he resigned his commission to pursue a career in songwriting. In Nashville, where he spent five years working menial jobs and learning to write songs, he combined his loneliness and alienation with countercultural directness to produce raw, emotional songs and generated eight studio albums through the 1970s that regularly joined the top 100 on U.S. country charts-four of which broke into the top ten. A fallow period followed in the 1980s and 1990s, but when Kristofferson re-emerged in the mid-2000s at age 70 with new studio albums, he again broke through both country and indie charts. In Kris Kristofferson: Country Highwayman, Mary G. Hurd surveys the life and works of this highly respected American songwriter. For many, Kristofferson's songs remain the gold standard of modern songwriters, and Kris Kristofferson follows the commitment to freedom of expression that has characterized his songwriting and struggles with the music industry. The author also explores his film career, work with the Highwaymen, liberal activism, decision to write and record two albums of material protesting the U.S. government's intrusion in Central America, and reflowering as a musical artist with the release of This Old Road in 2006 and other studio albums. Kris Kristofferson: Country Highwayman should appeal not only to dedicated fans of Kristofferson's work as an artist but also to anyone interested in country music and its influence on modern Americana and the roots of music traditions.

When George Jones recorded "He Stopped Loving Her Today" more than thirty years ago, he was a walking disaster. Twin addictions to drugs and alcohol had him drinking Jim Beam by the case and snorting cocaine as long as he was awake. Before it was over, Jones would be bankrupt, homeless, and an unwilling patient at an Alabama mental institution. In the midst of all this chaos, uber producer Billy Sherrill--the man who discovered Tammy Wynette and co-wrote "Stand by Your Man"--would somehow coax the performance of a lifetime out of the mercurial Jones. The result was a country masterpiece.

In "He Stopped Loving Her Today," the story behind the making of the song often voted the best country song ever by both critics and fans, offers an overview of country music's origins and a search for the music's illusive Holy Grail: authenticity. The schizoid bottom line--even though country music is undeniably a branch of the make-believe world of show biz, to fans and scholars alike, authenticity remains the ultimate measure of the music's power."

"Southern Fiddlers and Fiddle Contests" explores the phenomenon of American fiddle contests, which now have replaced dances as the main public event where American fiddlers get together. Chris Goertzen studies this change and what it means for audiences, musicians, traditions, and the future of southern fiddle music.

Goertzen traces fiddling and fiddle contests from mid-eighteenth-century Scotland to the modern United States. He takes the reader on journeys to the important large contests, such as those in Hallettville, Texas; Galax, Virginia; Weiser, Idaho; and also to smaller ones, including his favorite in Athens, Alabama. He reveals what happens on stage and during such off-stage activities as camping, jamming, and socializing, which many fiddlers consider much more important than the competition.

Through multiple interviews, Goertzen also reveals the fiddlers' lives as told in their own words. The reader learns how and in what environments these fiddlers started playing, where they perform today, how they teach, what they think of contests, and what values they believe fiddling supports. "Southern Fiddlers and Fiddle Contests" shows how such contests have become living embodiments of American nostalgia.

This volume focuses on fifty of the most important entertainers in the history of country music, from its beginnings in the folk music of early America through the 1970s. Divided into five distinct categories, it discusses the pioneers who brought mountain music to mass audiences; cowboys and radio stars who spread country music countrywide; honky-tonk and bluegrass musicians who differentiated country music during the 1940s; the major contributions that female artists made to the genre; and the modern country sound which dominated the genre from the late 1950s to the mid - 1980s. Each entry includes a brief biography of the chosen artist with special emphasis on experiences which influenced their musical careers. Covered musicians include Fiddlin' John Carson, Riley Puckett, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Bob Willis, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Sr., Dale Evans, June Carter Cash, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, Roy Clark, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard.

"Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press" For the Cowboy Junkies it all begins with a song: an acoustic guitar and a voice. But each song comes to each album with its own history, along its own strange path. Some are born and realized in a matter of minutes; others take years to finally find a place. Some pop out as perfect little gems; others mutate and transform themselves, stealing and pillaging from the unformed. XX celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the Cowboy Junkies, one of the most distinctive and influential rock bands in recent years. Starting with the seminal album "The Trinity Session," the Canadian band's signature sound, based on traditional blues and post-punk rock, has garnered much critical acclaim and an uncommonly devoted international following. The Cowboy Junkies are guitarist and lyricist Michael Timmins, bassist Alan Anton, and Timmins's siblings Margo (lead vocals) and Peter (drums). This book, the first to focus on the Cowboy Junkies, offers an intimate look at the band through their own photographs and the poetic lyrics of Michael Timmins, who chose the selections. Each lyric is accompanied by a resonant illustration created by renowned artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, who is a friend and fan of the band.

There has never been a better time for a book on Gram Parsons. At the thirty-year anniversary of his death, his sound, a mix of country and rock 'n' roll, is absolutely everywhere. Popular musicians of today trace their inspiration to pick up a guitar to when they first heard his music. His songs and his style have had a lasting effect on the music of our time. Now, together with Parsons's daughter, Polly, Jessica Hundley has created an intimate and extensive biography that brings together never-before-seen photos and illustrations, unpublished letters, and in-depth interviews with some of the many artists whose work was shaped by Parsons, including Keith Richards, Emmylou Harris, Wilco, and Ryan Adams, among many others. Grievous Angel is the tribute that the legions of Parsons fans have been waiting for--a book that brings to life the story of the Southern boy who revolutionized the way music sounds.

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.

Johnny Cash is bigger than life, surrounded by myths and legends, a notoriously hard-drinking, hard-drugging man who sings searing songs of death, loss, God, and work. Since his debut in 1955, he has come to embody country music as well as the spirit of defiance and rebellion that drives rock, and has garnered an immense audience along the way, selling more than fifty million albums and winning ten Grammy awards. He is universally acknowledged as one of the musical giants of the century.In "Ring of Fire," some of our best music writers consider Cash decade by decade in a collection of thirty-two classic articles and essays. They follow him from his birth in 1932 to his meteoric rise to fame in the late '60s and early '70s, through his two-decade slump and his musical resurgence in the 1990s, through the phenomenal new albums he has made in the face of his recently diagnosed nerve disease. "Ring of Fire" takes the Reader format and transforms it into the best kind of biography: complex, insightful, and multifaceted.

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.

Here is Nat Hentoff's deeply felt exploration of jazz, blues, country, and gospel--and the musicians who bring the music to life. Hentoff has not only loved music all his life, he has lived it by being friends with many of the musicians he writes about in this collection. Hentoff poignantly describes the early days of Roy Eldridge and the last years of Billie Holiday and Bird. He tells amazing stories of the Count, Duke, and Dizzy. "Full of insightful behind-the-scenes encounters" ("San Francisco Chronicle"), "Listen to the Stories" covers new recordings and old legends, remarkable lives and unforgettable music.

They may wear cowboy hats and boots and sing about "faded love," but western swing musicians have always played jazz From Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys to Asleep at the Wheel, western swing performers have played swing jazz on traditional country instruments, with all of the required elements of jazz, and some of the best solo improvisation ever heard.

In this book, Jean A. Boyd explores the origins and development of western swing as a vibrant current in the mainstream of jazz. She focuses in particular on the performers who made the music, drawing on personal interviews with some fifty living western swing musicians. From pioneers such as Cliff Bruner and Eldon Shamblin to current performers such as Johnny Gimble, the musicians make important connections between the big band swing jazz they heard on the radio and the western swing they created and played across the Southwest from Texas to California.

From this first-hand testimony, Boyd re-creates the world of western swing-the dance halls, recording studios, and live radio shows that broadcast the music to an enthusiastic listening audience. Although the performers typically came from the same rural roots that nurtured country music, their words make it clear that they considered themselves neither "hillbillies" nor "country pickers," but jazz musicians whose performance approach and repertory were no different from those of mainstream jazz. This important aspect of the western swing story has never been told before.

Celebrating the dark origins of our most American music, Country reveals a wild shadowland of history that encompasses blackface minstrels and yodeling cowboys; honky-tonk hell and rockabilly heaven; medieval myth and musical miscegenation; sex, drugs, murder; and rays of fierce illumination on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others, famous and forgotten, whose demonology is America's own. Profusely and superbly illustrated, Country stands as one of the most brilliant explorations of American musical culture ever written.

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.

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.

A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022 Roland White's long career has taken him from membership in Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys and Lester Flatt's Nashville Grass to success with his own Roland White Band. A master of the mandolin and acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, White has mentored a host of bluegrass musicians and inspired countless others. Bob Black draws on extensive interviews with White and his peers and friends to provide the first in-depth biography of the pioneering bluegrass figure. Born into a musical family, White found early success with the Kentucky Colonels during the 1960s folk revival. The many stops and collaborations that marked White's subsequent musical journey trace the history of modern bluegrass. But Black also delves into the seldom-told tale of White's life as a working musician, one who endured professional and music industry ups-and-downs to become a legendary artist and beloved teacher. An entertaining merger of memories and music history, Mandolin Man tells the overdue story of a bluegrass icon and his times.

G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter were two of the most influential artists in the early days of country music. Songs they popularized, like "Tom Dooley," "Little Maggie," "Handsome Molly," and "Nine Pound Hammer," are still staples of traditional music. Although the duo sold tens of thousands of records during the 1920s, the peak of their career, the details of their lives have been largely unknown, until now. Featuring never before published photographs and using interviews from friends and relatives, as well as contemporary scholarship, this book is the first to fully explore the lives and songs of G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter. It also examines the Southern Appalachian world that shaped their music. What emerges is a fascinating mixture of romantic intrigues, tragic deaths, and world-class music.

During the 1940s, country music was rapidly evolving from traditional songs and string band styles to honky-tonk, western swing, and bluegrass, via radio, records, and film. The Blue Sky Boys, brothers Bill (1917-2008) and Earl (1919-1998) Bolick, resisted the trend, preferring to perform folk and parlor songs, southern hymns, and new compositions that enhanced their trademark intimacy and warmth. They were still in their teens when they became professional musicians to avoid laboring in Depression-era North Carolina cotton mills. Their instantly recognizable style was fully formed by 1936, when even their first records captured soulful harmonies accented with spare guitar and mandolin accompaniments. They inspired imitators, but none could duplicate the Blue Sky Boys' emotional appeal or their distinctive Catawba County accents. Even their last records in the 1970sretained their unique magical sound decades after other country brother duets had come and gone. In this absorbing account, Dick Spottswood combines excerpts from Bill Bolick's numerous spoken interviews and written accounts of his music, life, and career into a single narrative that presents much of the story in Bill's own voice. Spottswood reveals fascinating nuggets about broadcasting, recording, and surviving in the 1930s world of country music. He describes how the growing industry both aided and thwarted the Bolick brothers' career, and how World War II nearly finished it. The book features a complete, extensively annotated list of Blue Sky Boys songs, an updated discography that includes surviving unpublished records, and dozens of vintage photos and sheet music covers.

Living in the Woods in a Tree is an intimate glimpse into the turbulent life of Texas music legend Blaze Foley (1949-1989), seen through the eyes of Sybil Rosen, the woman for whom he wrote his most widely known song, "If I Could Only Fly." It captures the exuberance of their fleeting idyll in a tree house in the Georgia woods during the countercultural 1970s. Rosen offers a firsthand witnessing of Foley's transformation from a reticent hippie musician to the enigmatic singer/songwriter who would live and die outside society's rules. While Foley's own performances are only recently being released, his songs have been covered by Merle Haggard, Lyle Lovett, and John Prine. When he first encountered "If I Could Only Fly," Merle Haggard called it "the best country song I've heard in fifteen years." In a work that is part-memoir, part-biography, Rosen struggles to finally come to terms with Foley's myth and her role in its creation. Her tracing of his impact on her life navigates a lovers' roadmap along the permeable boundary between life and death. A must-read for all Blaze Foley and Texas music fans, as well as romantics of all ages, Living in the Woods in a Tree is an honest and compassionate portrait of the troubled artist and his reluctant muse.

Relying on facts, opinions and personal testimonies from the artists themselves, this book takes a detailed look at the huge impact that Mexican music and culture has had - and continues to have - on Country music in its various forms. Although this very American cultural expression has changed significantly over the last few years, Mexico - with its border towns, beaches, colonial architecture and ancient ruins conjuring up a range of powerful images - has remained an influential presence in Nashville, Texas, and even places like Australia and South Africa. Featuring contributions from Merle Haggard, Jimmy Buffett, Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, Jessi Colter, Johnny Rodriguez and Flaco Jimenez, this book lifts the lid on the unique and largely undocumented relationship between "America's Music" and Mexico.

'It seems I've done most things I wanted to do, but of all things, I think I most enjoy finding good songs and recording them. There are so many songs I want to record that I will be kept busy for as long as I can keep it up ... It is the people you meet along the road of life who make the travelling easier. No wonder I loved it all.' - Slim Dusty Slim Dusty was Australia's most well-loved and best known country music performer. A legend in the bush, his famous hit 'A Pub With No Beer' made him a household name in the towns and cities too. This is the story of the life that Slim Dusty and Joy McKean shared for their fifty years of marriage and touring together - their love for each other, their family and their music - and their determination to bring country music to the whole of Australia. Slim died in 2003, but throughout Australia, and around the world, people are still playing his songs and passing them on to new generations of fans. In this updated edition of the classic autobiography, Joy McKean writes about her family's commitment to honouring his memory and their work to keep his name alive. If you love today's Australian country music, this is the story of where it all started. '... just like his lyrics, the prose is perfect. Here he is talking about the early Dusty days. It's just like listening to a bright spark in the bush.' - The Age 'Slim blazed the red-dirt trail for Australian singer/songwriters, allowing us to remain unashamedly ourselves.' - Missy Higgins

Outlaw by acclaimed author Michael Streissguth follows the stories of three legends as they redefined country music: Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson. Streissguth delves into the country music scene in the late '60s and early '70s, when these rebels found themselves in Music City writing songs and vying for record deals. Channeling the unrest of the times, all three Country Music Hall of Famers resisted the music industry's unwritten rules and emerged as leaders of the outlaw movement that ultimately changed the recording industry. Outlaw offers a broad portrait of the outlaw movement in Nashville that includes a diverse secondary cast of characters, such as Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell, Kinky Friedman, and Billy Joe Shaver, among others. With archival photographs throughout, Outlaw is a comprehensive examination of a fascinating shift in country music, and the three unbelievably talented musicians who forged the way.

Its strains may be haunting, but western swing is alive and on the upswing, enjoying a renaissance among musicians too young to recall or even comprehend its heyday. For them, the term may evoke the nationally known country music of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys and the Spade Cooley Band. Yet on the local level, western swing bands dominated the airways and dance halls in every town and rural setting throughout the Southwest in the 1930s and by the 1940s had spread their influence and music to California. Jean A. Boyd presents the history and music of those bands that did not garner national fame, but were local sensations to thousands of southwesterners hungry for diversion and good dancing during the depression and World War II. Devoted fans who travel the festival circuit will surely appreciate the histories and recollections Boyd has carefully compiled, while musicologists will welcome her musical analysis and her transcriptions of recorded performances. Performers, as well, may learn new licks and tricks from the ubiquitous swing jazz artists of a time not yet forgotten, preserved here for another generation's enjoyment and edification.