In a dim clearing off a county road in Kentucky sits a sagging outdoor stage buried in moss and dead leaves. It used to be the centrepiece of carnival-like Sunday afternoons where local guitarists, fiddlers and mandolin players hammered out old mountain ballads and legends from the dawn of country music performed their classic hits. Most of the musicians who showed up have long since passed, but Nashville stars Ricky Skaggs and Marty Stuart survive. They were barely teenagers in the early 1970s when they visited this stage in the care of legends Ralph Stanley and Lester Flatt, respectively. Skaggs and Stuart followed their bosses to dozens of stages throughout Appalachia and deeper into the American southland. They were the children, absorbing the wondrous music and strange dramas around them as they became innovators and living symbols of country music. Highways and Heartaches takes readers on the rural circuit Skaggs and Stuart travelled, where an acoustic sound first assembled by masters such as Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, and Mother Maybelle Carter ruled the day. The young men were heirs to a bluegrass tradition transmitted to them early in life. One part mountain soul and another African American-influenced rhythm, the music they received was alternately celebrated and neglected in the more than fifty years after the two met in 1971, but since then it has never stopped evolving and influencing the wider American culture thanks to Skaggs and Stuart and other actors in this book, such as Jerry Douglas, Tony Rice, Keith Whitley, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt. Riveting portraits of Johnny Cash, Ralph Stanley, Lester Flatt and other heartland-born figures emerge, too. Moulded by forces in post-war southern culture such as racial conflict, fringe politics, evangelicalism, growing federal government influence, and stubborn patterns of Appalachian living and thinking, Skaggs and Stuart injected the spirit of bluegrass into their hard-wrought experiments in mainstream country music later in life, fuelling the profitability and credibility of the fabled genre. Skaggs's new traditionalism of the 1980s, integrating mountain instruments with elements of contemporary country music, created a new sound for the masses and placed him in the vanguard of Nashville's recording artists while Stuart embraced seminal influences and attitudes from the riches of American culture to produce a catalogue of significant recordings. Skaggs and Stuart's friendship took years to jell, but their similar pathways reveal a shared dedication to the soul of country music and highlight the curious day-to-day experiences of two lads growing up on the demanding rural route in bluegrass culture. Their journeys-populated by grizzled mentors, fearsome undertows, and cultural upheaval-influenced their creativity and, ultimately, cut life-giving tributaries in the ungainly, eternal story of country music.

"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.

"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.

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.

After Bob Dylan came to Nashville in 1966 to record his classic album Blonde on Blonde, his embrace of Nashville and its unmatched session musicians—known as the Nashville Cats—inspired many other artists, among them Neil Young, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, and Paul McCartney, to follow. Around the same time, Johnny Cash was recruiting folk and rock musicians—including Dylan—to appear on his groundbreaking network television show, The Johnny Cash Show. This book was published as a companion to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum exhibition Dylan, Cash, and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City and features more than twenty commissioned illustrations by noted artist and musician Jon Langford. This book also includes 240 rare photographs and celebrates a time of great cultural vitality for Nashville, tracking the city’s music scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and illuminates Nashville’s rise as a world-class recording center.

"Fans of Arnold's mellow music will appreciate the intensely detailed record of his private life and public career. Others may find the vivid picture of country music's early decades (the many small-town radio stations and deejays that supported the music, the backroads tours, the struggling record labels) quite intriguing." --"Kirkus Reviews"

Illustrated with fifty-four photographs and featuring a comprehensive discography and sessionography, this book traces Eddy Arnold's origins from a cotton farm in western Tennessee to his legendary status in the world of country music. Michael Streissguth covers Arnold's success as a top-selling artist in the 1940s and 1950s and his temporary wane as listeners gravitated toward the rock & roll sound, embodied by newcomer Elvis Presley. Arnold (1918-2008) kept recording, however, and working on his craft. By the mid-60s, he reemerged as a pop crooner with his hit song "Make the World Go Away." His blend of country sentiments and pop stylings created the template for Nashville's modern country music sound. Throughout his career he was a major concert attraction and a radio and television star. Few other figures can claim to have had as great an influence on contemporary country and popular arranging.

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.

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.

To millions, he was the rebellious Man in Black, the unabashed patriot, the redeemed Christian-the king of country music. But Johnny Cash (1932-2003) was also an uncertain country boy whose dreams were born in the cotton fields of Arkansas and who struggled his entire life with a guilt-ridden childhood, addictions, and self-doubt. Johnny Cash: The Biography explores many often overlooked aspects of the legend's life and career, uncovering the origins of his songwriting and trademark boom-chicka-boom rhythm and delving into the details of his personal life, including his drug dependency, which dogged him long after many thought he'd beaten it. Scrupulously researched, passionately told, Johnny Cash: The Biography is the unforgettable portrait of an enduring American icon.

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.