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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.
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