Explores the history of country music in America. Discusses various musical styles, famous musicians and groups, and hit songs. Includes sample playlists, quotes, photographs, a glossary, a timeline, biographical sketches, award lists, and further resources.

While on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, journalist and novelist Paul Hemphill wrote of that pivotal moment in the late sixties when traditional defenders of the hillbilly roots of country music were confronted by the new influences and business realities of pop music. The demimonde of the traditional Nashville venues (Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, Robert's Western World, and the Ryman Auditorium) and first-wave artists (Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Lefty...

"A definitive look at the outlaw country music movement, [Outlaw] follows the stories of three legendary icons--Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson--as they redefined country music in the late '60s and early '70s, set in the rich backdrop of Nashville"--Provided by publisher.

Chronicles the history of the Nashville music industry from its founding in 1942 to the present day, and examines the evolution of country music in Nashville, Tennessee, and its influence on pop culture and other music genres. Includes black-and-white photographs.

Merle Haggard has enjoyed artistic and professional triumphs few can match. He's charted more than a hundred country hits, including thirty-eight number ones. He's released dozens of studio albums and another half dozen or more live ones, performed upwards of ten thousand concerts, been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and seen his songs performed by artists as diverse as Lynryd Skynyrd, Elvis Costello, Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson,

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"Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a "lively, engaging, and often wise" (The New York Times Book Review) voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of Black country music. Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite...

"Brian Fairbanks draws a line from Buddy Holly through the Outlaw stars of the 60s and 70s, all the way to the country headliners and more diverse, up-and-coming Nashville rebels of today, bringing the reader deep into the worlds of not only Cash, Nelson, Kristofferson, and Jennings but artists like Chris Stapleton, Simpson, Bingham, and Isbell, stadium-filling masters whose stories have not been told in book form, as well as new, diverse artists...

"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...