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Post by Admin on Apr 29, 2013 15:33:26 GMT -5
What's on your list of favorite books on the subject of country music? I always start with Jimmie Rodgers - the Yodeling Brakeman whose music was influenced by both Appalachian styles and Blues. JIMMIE RODGERS:LIFE & TIME: The Life and Times of America's Blue Yodeler Nolan Porterfield Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933), the first performer elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, was a folk hero in his own lifetime and has been idolized by fans and emulated by performers ever since. His life story has been particularly susceptible to romanticizing, marked as it was by humble origins, sudden success and fame, and an early death from tuberculosis. Nolan Porterfield's biography banishes the rumors and myths that have long shrouded the Blue Yodeler's life story. Unlike previous writings about Rodgers, Porterfield's book derives from extensive and detailed research into original sources: private letters, personal interviews, court records, and newspaper accounts. Jimmie Rodgers significantly expands and alters our knowledge of the entertainer's life and career, explaining the nature of his role in American culture of the Depression era and providing insightful background on the milieu in which he worked. Porterfield writes a preface for this edition. Just a great biography!
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Post by Admin on Apr 30, 2013 14:04:45 GMT -5
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family & Their Legacy in American MusicMark Zwonitzer, Charles Hirshberg This is one of my very favorite books. You know that book that each of us has in our collection that we want everyone to read? That book that we loan to friends, family, colleagues, and (I suppose in some cases) strangers, just wanting them to read it because we KNOW they'll love it? This is that book.
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Post by Admin on May 1, 2013 10:51:13 GMT -5
If you're just beginning to explore country music, this is a fair reference book. From Library Journal A surprisingly frank product of the Nashville country music establishment (it was compiled by the Country Music Foundation), this title promises to be the definitive historical and biographical work of the past eight decades of country music. Some 150 authorities (e.g., Colin Escott and Ronnie Pugh) discuss the music in all its permutations, and the results are beyond impressive. Interspersed with the biographical entries are historical and sociological essays on the literature of country music, country songwriting, gospel, folk and popular music connections, and even touring and costuming. Thirteen appendixes cover the Country Music Hall of Fame, radio stations, and best-selling country albums. While all the major artists (e.g., Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb) are given their due, this work also gets at the second- and third-tier country singers as well as songwriters, musicians, DJs, record company executives, and others who have played roles in the genre. By covering contemporary artists as well as those who have been lost in the mists of time, the book is superior to any country music reference this reviewer has seen. Well written and heavily illustrated, this is the only country music reference work most libraries will need. An unparalleled work, worth its price and highly recommended.?David M. Turkalo, Suffolk Univ. Law School Lib., Boston Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Post by Admin on May 4, 2013 15:58:21 GMT -5
Country Music: The MastersBy Marty Stuart At bottom, country music is about the abiding joys of home—both real and imagined. Take away the songs that express in one way or another a longing to return to the comforting place of one’s childhood, and there would be precious little of this music left. The armature of home life is, of course, the family; and it is the familial nature of the performers who created modern country music that Marty Stuart illuminates in this collection of snapshots and formal portraits. Stuart took most of these photos while he was playing in or leading various country bands. There is significantly more to this book, though, than just a procession of famous and semi-famous faces. Stuart also offers photos of ornate stage costumes, show posters, stars’ tombstones, first drafts of classic songs, fabled guitars, mandolins and fiddles, ancient cabins and farm buildings, honky tonks, country churches, and the scenes of Patsy Cline’s plane crash and Stringbean’s murder. (Those who’ve never heard of Stringbean will find less to savor in this book than those familiar enough with country music to remember him as the lanky, banjo-playing comedian from Hee Haw. This is very much an insider’s book, not a fact- and date-laden introduction to the subject.) No one else in country music today is as well suited to convey the music’s essence as the Mississippi-born Stuart. A prodigy on the mandolin, he began performing professionally when he was twelve years old, and at thirteen he joined the legendary Lester Flatt’s band. Later, he toured for several years with Johnny Cash (and married his daughter, Cindy) before venturing out on his own. He went on to win four Grammy awards and become a revered member the Grand Ole Opry. Besides his instrumental skills, Stuart brings to this work an encyclopedic knowledge of country music and a curator’s zeal for collecting, cataloging, and annotating its artifacts. He has amassed one of the largest collections of country music memorabilia in private hands—some 20,000 items. Very early in his career, Stuart saw in a Greenwich Village bookstore a series of behind-the-scenes photos of jazz stars taken by jazz bassist Milt Hinton, who, as it turned out, carried a camera with him to all his gigs. Realizing that he, too, had a rare degree of access to famous artists, Stuart decided to do the same. Thus began the visual treasury this book incorporates. Many of Stuart’s pictures are masterpieces of character and mood. One shows Bill Monroe, the originator of bluegrass music, playing mandolin for a flock of chickens, as his long white limousine stretches behind him. In another, Monroe and Flatt shake hands on stage to end a feud that had kept them apart for twenty-five years. Then there’s the garishly decorated gravesite of Teddy and Doyle, the Wilburn Brothers, a nightmare of sepulchral overkill. Stuart also includes the surprisingly well-composed photo he took of singer Connie Smith when she performed in his hometown in 1970. Although only twelve at the time, he told his mother that he would one day marry Smith—and twenty-seven years later, he did. However, the most moving of Stuart’s images is his cover photo of Johnny Cash, taken four days before his death. In it, his jaw sunken, his nose strong and straight, his eye open but blank, Cash looks like he’s chiseled from stone. Enriching this collection is an enhanced CD that contains sixteen of Stuart’s spoken word narrations, four cuts of his instrumen-tal music, one song (“Dark Bird,” a tribute to Cash) and a music video of that song. It will mean more if one listens to the CD before paging through the book, even if one is conversant with country music. Stuart tells the stories behind many of the most eloquent photos, including those of Smith and Monroe. He also details Stringbean’s murder and explains why it took him so long to re-visit and photograph the house where the killing took place. Impressive though it is, the book has its flaws. Some of the performers pictured are “masters” only in the most elastic sense. Other undisputed masters are left out entirely, among them Conway Twitty, Barbara Mandrell, Reba McEntire, Ronnie Milsap, and Don Williams. It would be helpful, particularly to researchers, if the captions were more thorough and included dates and locations. But these are quibbles. Overall Stuart has achieved what he sought, and that was to illustrate through its practitioners the richness, beauty, and dignity of this often denigrated art form. Certainly, he ranks high among the masters he celebrates. Edward Morris October 13, 2008
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Post by Admin on May 6, 2013 8:30:42 GMT -5
When this book was published in 1975, the editors claimed it was the first time that academics had taken country music seriously. Country musicians and their listeners didn't care, I'm sure. They were country when country wasn't cool, and country music has always gotten along fine without professors, poohbahs and government grants. Still, the book was produced by enthusiasts, some of them in the trade, and remains valuable, both as a history, as profiles of several musicians and for its bibliographies and discographies. The discographies, of course, need to be matched with current issues, but they can help sort out the multiplicity of issues. As far as the authors are concerned, country music started with disc recordings. A sort of prequel chapter reviews some of the very earliest recorded musicians, like Eck Robertson, Fiddlin' John Carson and half of the Skillet Lickers: Riley Puckett (probably the first professional country musician), Gid Tanner and Clayton McMichen. Fate Norris is ignored, understandably because the recordings of his time didn't pick up his banjo among the ensemble, but unaccountably in the case of Lowe Stokes, who has some claim to be the greatest country fiddler who ever lived -- certainly the greatest one-armed country fiddler. Profiles are given to Macon, Vernon Dalhart, Bradley Kincaid, the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry, Bob Wills, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Chet Atkins, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, Tom T. Hall and Johnny Rodriguez. The later choices offer some insight into where people thought country music was heading in the mid-'70s. As it happened, television and the chance to make big money ruined mainstream country music, just as it did NASCAR, pro wrestling and barbecue; but luckily, the huge expansion of music generally over the past 30 years left a residue of fans and performers of old-time music who, though only a corporal's guard compared with the millions of consumers of bland Nashville country music, are probably more numerous now than in the heyday of country, when it was something southerners kept to themselves. One cannot ask too much of a volume like this, and Cajun music is ignored, the interfertilization of black and white styles is only glancingly addressed and the tension between religious music and play-party music is merely alluded to. But if you can find it, "The Stars of Country Music" is worth having for anyone who likes the old ways. Just remember, as Gid Tanner admonished, roll up the carpet before you start dancing
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Post by Admin on May 15, 2013 14:13:11 GMT -5
Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams Paul Hemphill 224 pages Publisher: Penguin Books (August 29, 2006) Language: English ISBN-10: 0143037714 ISBN-13: 978-0143037712 Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer and songwriter, died alone in the backseat of his Cadillac on New Year?s Day, 1953. He died much as he had lived: drunk, forlorn, suffering from a birth defect, wondering when the bubble would burst. Having sprouted out of nowhere, like a weed in the wilds of south Alabama, he was gone at the age of twenty-nine. Now, with his definitive biography of the man and his music, Paul Hemphill takes the reader on a journey through Hank Williams?s life and times: his dirt-poor beginnings as a sickly child, learning music from a black street singer, refining it in raucous rural honky-tonks during the Depression, emerging as a star of the Grand Ole Opry. Uneducated, virtually fatherless, an alcoholic in his teens, unlucky at love, Hank mined his experiences to write songs that will live forever. Hemphill, author of The Nashville Sound and the son of a long-distance trucker from Alabama, brings his background to bear on a story that often reads like fiction. He has unearthed many fresh details in Williams?s life, but most importantly, he has explained that life and given it the lively telling it deserves.
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Post by Admin on May 15, 2013 14:22:31 GMT -5
The Stonemans An Appalachian Family and the Music That Shaped Their Lives Awards and Recognition: Winner of the ARSC Award for Excellence in Recorded Country Music, 1994. The Stonemans is an eye-opening slice of Americana---a trip through nearly twenty years of country music history following a single family from their native Blue Ridge Mountains to the slums of Washington, D.C., and the glitter of Nashville. As early as 1924 Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman realized the potential of what is now known as country music, and he tried to carve a career from it. Successful as a recording artist from 1925 through 1929, Stoneman foundered during the Great Depression. He, his wife, and their nine children went to Washington in 1932, struggling through a decade of hardship and working to revive the musical career Pop still believed in. The Stoneman Family won the Country Music Association's Vocal Group of the Year Award in 1967. After Pop's death a year later, some of the children scattered to pursue their own careers. Ivan Tribe relies on extensive interviews with the Stonemans and their friends in this chronicle of a family whose members have clung to their musical heritage through good times and bad. "This is no rags-to-riches story. . . . That the Stonemans allowed their history to be presented so candidly is a testament to their integrity and respect for historical truth."--Norm Cohen, editor of the abridged edition of Vance Randolph's Ozark Folksongs Ivan M. Tribe, a professor of history at the University of Rio Grande, Ohio, is the author of Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia.
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Post by Admin on May 18, 2013 10:10:49 GMT -5
DeFord Bailey: A Black Star in Early Country Music David C. Morton (Author) Charles K. Wolfe (Contributor) Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly In 1973, while writing a feature story for a newsletter for residents of public housing in Nashville, Morton realized that his subject, an elderly black man, was the legendary "harmonica wizard" of the early days of Grand Ole Opry. During the next decade Morton, now executive director of the Reno (Nev.) Housing Authority, tape-recorded conversations with Bailey, collected letters and documents, and, assisted by Wolfe, a country music historian at Middle Tennessee State University, wrote this biography of the reclusive musician who had virtually disappeared from public view for 40 years. Quoting Bailey's colorful speech wherever possible, the authors chronicle his career and tell the story of Grand Ole Opry and the people who promoted it in the 1920s and '30s. They also set the record straight on how Bailey, who died in 1982 at the age of 83, was, through no fault of his own, fired from the show in 1941. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Library Journal Bailey is largely forgotten today, a victim of the recording industry's emphasis on the blues during the 1920s--a decision which segregated forever "black" folk music from "white" folk music. Bailey was from an African American mountain culture that shared much of its musical heritage with its Anglo-Saxon neighbors, producing a unique hybrid which Bailey called "black hillbilly." A virtuoso on the harmonica, guitar, and banjo, Bailey became one of the Grand Old Opry's earliest stars during the 1920s, only to be fired from the Opry in 1941 during one of the Opry's more repressive eras. Bailey's story is told mainly in his own words through interviews conducted by his longtime friend Morton, with Wolfe (English and folklore, Middle Tennessee State Univ.) providing cultural and historical background. The authors' stated goal was to write a book of universal appeal, and indeed the work is a fascinating cultural history. Unfortunately, Bailey's obscurity will probably limit the book to folk music enthusiasts. Nevertheless, it is highly recommended. - James Stephenson, Soc. of the Cincinnati Lib., Washington, D.C. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Product Details Paperback: 224 pages Publisher: University of Tennessee Press; 1st edition (February 1, 1993) Language: English ISBN-10: 0870497928 ISBN-13: 978-0870497926 This book is a must have for any country, blues and folk music fan. This book is important in more that one way. It tells you the story of a great man and you get to learn much about early country radio and music. The book also contains many pictures of the Harmonica Wizard, DeFord Bailey. DeFord was the first artist to ever appear on the Grand Ole Opry. I also want to recomend the CD; The Legendary DeFord Bailey. You can look forward to many great hours reading about his life and listening to his famous and unparallelled harmonica playing, banjo pickin and guitar playing DeFord was truly a folk music genius God Bless Him
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Post by Admin on May 30, 2013 19:49:41 GMT -5
From Kirkus Reviews This study of the country-music industry takes a smart look at the business end of America's most popular musical genre. Music journalist Daley divides Nashville's music empire into four fiefdoms: producers (whom he dubs ``princes''), songwriters, publishers, and musicians. Among musicians, the author focuses not on star performers but on session musicians--the professionals who give the music its identifiable sound. With this rule in place, Daley adopts an anecdotal approach to the growth and development of Nashville, calling on his dozens of interviews with major figures to explain what makes the city the undisputed capital of country. Those interviewed range from relative old-timers like Owen Bradley (who, with Chet Atkins, helped to establish many of the unwritten rules of Daley's title) to the newest musicians to join the A-list of session players selected to cut records by producers. Daley painstakingly details such unwritten rules as ``Thou shalt live in Nashville,'' which refers to the industry's disapproval of anyone daring to commute between the main hive and the outlands. Indeed, if producers are the princes of Nashville, then the twin villains, observes Daley, are the swaggering provinces of New York and Los Angeles, whose expatriates are treated with no small amount of suspicion when they arrive on Nashville's Music Row, purportedly threatening the local industry's ``rigid, familial, and benignly feudal structure.'' Rigid as this parochial prejudice against outsiders and commuters may be, it has also, as Daley points out, helped to keep country music authentic and has led Nashville to spectacular success in sending its music all around the nation. A solid plumbing of the forces driving a dominant and uniquely American industry. (16 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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