Music Tomes

Sad News

2010-07-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in my return post that I had read a book on Hee Haw when I finally got back around to reading music related books. There are a couple of reasons that that was my first book.

The first is, quite simply, that I love the show. For all of its corny humor and what might be viewed as simple comedy, it still makes me laugh. I also love to see many of the country stars in their prime, or even before their prime.

Longtime readers of Music tomes might recall that one of the reasons I put the blog on hold is because my son was born. He is now 17 months old and his absolute favorite show is Hee Haw. He laughs when they do. He dances when the music is on. He cheers - "Yay, Buck" - when Buck Owens takes the screen. He can identify Buck (alternately "Buck" and "BuckOwens"), Roy, Grandpa, Junior, Archie, Gordie, and the Hagars. That's the second reason I read the book.

A new Hee Haw related book was released a month or so ago, this one written by co-creator John Aylesworth. Aylesworth, along with Frank Peppiatt, created the show targeted at an audience of country music lovers they saw as under served. They had experience in comedy with the "Jonathan Winters Show," which is where they met Roy Clark. Aylesworth also had experience producing music-oriented shows like "Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music," "Your Hit Parade," and "The Judy Garland Show." He would later produce "Dolly" for Dolly Parton and the very short-lived new country showcase "Nashville Palace."

A review of Aylesworth new book, "The Corn Was Green: The Inside Story of Hee Haw" is forthcoming. Two days ago I exchanged emails with Mr. Aylesworth setting up an interview for the site. Tonight I received an email from his wife with the sad news that Mr. Aylesworth passed away last night at the age of 80.

My condolences go out to her and the family.

A Slight Return...

2010-07-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I have had the opportunity to post here. Work and my baby boy have kept me busy, which meant reading time was near zero.

But there has been a change in fortune in that area and that means there will be sporadic postings of reviews and interviews forthcoming.

I have, in the past month or so, had the time to read through some older music-related volumes I've been meaning to get to.

The first was the 1996 book "Life In The Kornfield" by Hee Haw producer Sam Lovullo. The book is structured with a short intro to and history of the show followed by Lovullo's recollections on members of the cast and many of the guests. Why, after so many months of not reading music related books, was this the first on my stack? That will be answered in this blog in the very near future.

The next book I got to was "Freebirds" by Marley Brant, a 2002 biography of Lynyrd Skynyrd. I have been a huge Skynyrd fan since high school 20+ years ago. This was the last bio of the band I had left to read. If you haven't read anything on the band, this is the most comprehensive of the three books on the band. It isn't without it's weak points, but overall it was pretty good.

I'm currently making my way through "Where Dead Voices Gather," Nick Tosches 2002 biography of minstrel singer, and early country music influencer, Emmett Miller. I'm only about half way through, but fans of early country music and those interested in where different musics and influences cross paths will enjoy this book.

It might be a couple of weeks, but I will be back.

They're dropping like flies, kids...

2009-06-03T12:27:00.001-07:00

Like I said a few posts ago, this blog focuses mainly on blogs, but I love music journalism in all mediums. Well, a couple more bits of bad news on that front.

Radio & Records announced today (Here) they will be closing their doors after 35 years of publication.

Also announced today is the news that Performing Songwriter will also be shutting down operation (Announcment here.

The moral of the story: If there is a magazine you enjoy out there, support it.

Book Signing

2009-06-02T05:43:00.000-07:00

I'll be back later this week with a couple of reviews and hopefully an interview next week. One of the books I'll be posting a review for is the new book by Patsi Bale Cox, The Garth Factor: The Career Behind Country’s Big Boom. Let me say, even if you aren't a fan of Garth Brooks, you will enjoy this book, but more on that later.

I received an email from the Country Music Hall of Fame this morning and it noted that this Friday (June 5) Cox will be there discussing the book and signing copies. more info here: Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

(On a related note, if anyone sees a book signing of interest coming up, please feel free to pass it along. These book signings are a good way to learn a little more about a subject than is in the book and a good turn out is encouraging to the authors.)

Interview with Barry Mazor

2009-05-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite music journalist, Barry Mazor, has a new book hitting shelves on May 15, (although, I believe, it is shipping from Amazon right now) titled Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America's Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century. In it he takes a look at the legacy and influence of Rodgers music as well as putting the performer in context, discussing how his contemporaries viewed him. It is a book I heartily recommend. (You can read my previous interview with Mazor here.

In addition to the release of his first book, Mazor will be honored at the 2009 International Country Music Conference with the Charlie Lamb Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism. A prestigous award in the field of country and roots music journalism. Barry was kind enough to take a few minutes to talk to me about the new book and what the award means to him.

Music Tomes: Your new book, Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, comes at the subject of Jimmie Rodgers music from a different angle researching the far-reaching influence of his music rather than attempting to be a straight biography. How did the idea come to you to approach it in that way?

Barry Mazor: I knew that what I wanted to do, the mission of the project in a way, was to make the sense of power of Jimmie Rodgers and his music really palpable to people again - in the way that people more broadly get how and why Elvis or Johnny Cash, for examples, have mattered and still can, even after 75-80 years. And a lot of that impact in Jimmie's case came after he was dead, or in places he never got when he was alive. So combine that with the fact that there was a solid and thorough biography already out here, and it was pretty clear that just taking a stab at a conventional "life of Jimmie Rodgers" couldn't do the job. I came to that conclusion pretty quickly.

The subject — and it's reflected in the title that I eventually came up with — had to be what happens when audiences and other performers have encountered Jimmie's msuic and image and the very idea of him, from his day to ours. It's the part most often left out of looks at pop music of any sort — what other people took the performer to be, what they made of him. I'd seen books that track the sort of idea where the subject was, say, Shakespeare or Leonardo or, for that matter, Jesus, and there were hundreds of years of changes of how the subject was taken to be - but not a book on pop that worked that way. But in Jimmie Rodgers, we've got over 80 years from when he first started working till today, and so many directions his music and the way he handled himself taken up in that span — and it's on the record, or could be. I thought it could be done, with enough first-hand interviews and research, and that's what I've tried to do. And I hope that readers will find that it has the additional benefit of being an involving story!

MT: Nolan Porterfield published the definitive Rodgers biography over 30 years ago and it seems very little research has been brought to light in the time between. But you were able to uncover some never seen bits of information including family scrapbooks and concert schedules. Do you remember what was the first piece you found that you realized hadn't been published yet? Can you describe the feeling?

BM: I'm not sure that I can remember the order those things came in at this point, Eric, but I certainly recall the feeling. Some of these were not just new things about Jimmie Rodgers, I should point out, but new things about Tommy Duncan (the great Rodgers-interpreting vocalist from Bob Wills' Playboys), or new things about Johnny Cash's obsession with Jimmie, or how Jimmie's music worked its way into Jerry Lee Lewis's — or how exactly Dolly Parton came to sing '"Muleskinner Blues" as she did - according to them. As the full title says, the book's about the pop sounds of a century. And I definitely had moments of, "Boy; I think I've got something there," with things like those.

But in terms of Jimmie Rodgers bio information itself, many of the hard new revelations came because I got access to documents like those scrapbooks you mentioned, a personal road diary Jimmie kept in his last year, and the letters he wrote to his wife from the Taft Hotel in New York immediately before he died, so we learn of his state of mind at the end of his short life. I'll admit to trembling a little holding those and reading them - in a bank vault in San Antonio. His widow Carrie mentions them in her memoir; she received them after he was gone. But they've not been detailed before. This was thrilling to be able to relate.

MT: Something I found very interesting about the book was in the very last chapter, to close the book, you do something most authors don't do and that is introduce yourself by way of a brief biography and description of what roots music means to you. I thought it was a great way to wrap up the book. How did you come to include that part and why at the end rather than the beginning?

BM: That was something I felt like I had to do. One reason for pinpointing the different mutations and reinterpretations in the life story of Rodgers' music was to clear them out of the way — so we could better understand what he was up to himself, without middlemen - or women. And so I needed to lay out where I was coming from just like I had with everyone else. I'm not a privileged character.

MT: In you research, did you run across anything that surprised you about Rodgers or his influence?

BM: Lots. But I'll sort of give you an example. One of the stories that really got hold of me, and which I think people coming to it will find pretty engaging and funny, too, is how Jimmie Rodgers' music came to hit the top of the rock and roll charts through the one hit wonder band The Fendermen. Where they got the idea for their manic, near punk version of "Muleskinner" is none of the places I or most any chroniclers had thought. It's a great story involving divine intervention and the Strategic Air Command - and people are gonna have to read the book to hear that one!

MT: Following Rodgers legacy forward, how do you see it fitting in with the seeming dicothomy that is often argued between art and commercialism? Many current country artists are dismissed as being "too pop" or courting an "non-country" or cross-over audience, but didn't also Rodgers and the Carter Family to an extent?

BM: Jimmie Rodgers certainly did - and to a very considerable extent. And there have been those who thought that he was too commercial! Look; I'm of the school that says he was a part of pop culture, and what he created was, too - and that there's no automatic clash between that and art or truth. In fact, how he reached out to audiences through commercial channels is an important part of the music's story. Anyone - in his day or ours - has the perfect right to sit on the porch or parlor and play their heart out for themselves alone. But when they venture before audiences, and ask that audience to come back again, they're in the marketplace, whether they own up to it or not. I'm not saying that whether a record or song sells or not is inevitably a measure of its value, but it's not an inevitable measure of its lack of value either!

MT: This year you will be one of two recipients of the Charlie Lamb Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism. What does this award mean to you?

BM: That's a real surprise and it means a lot. Most of what I do, is cover what happens in music — country most often, and many other kinds, too - today. I want to see the music I care about have a past, a present, and a future, so it's touching to be cited for helping with that in some way. I'd also like to see music journalism have a future, too, and that may be more in question right now. We certainly all benefit from hearing the musical reactions and ideas of all sorts of people - and I guess the very idea behind Meeting Jimmie Rodgers shows that I mean that. But it's also good to have people with the time and focus to do the homework before the talking - and that mostly comes from those paid to do the job - somehow or other.

MT: The award is for Country Music Journalism and you do a good bit of freelance work for papers like the Wall Street Journal in a time when many newspapers are cutting arts related coverage or closing altogether. Many outlets, such as No Depression, a magazine you are closely associated with, are attempting to move online. If you can look into your crystal ball, what do you see the future of music journalism looking like?

BM: I'd like to know! Motley and changing and unpredictable I imagine. You never know. I can reach millions of people through the Journal, but the online version of No Depression was unable to sustain itself, so its already had to drop the pro writers and gone to a "community" Facebook-style model. As I was saying, music journalism is a profession to me, with value, not a hobby, and you can expect to see me in some new places besides the Journal before long.

Barry is adding dates to a book tour that kicked off at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. "I had a talk and video presentation about the book, along with the terrific singer John Lilly, at the Country Music Hall of Fame here in Nashville last week," he says, "and they tell me that a video of the whole program will be viewable on their website soon. And I'm about to have what looks like a lot of fun–a book tour across the heart of Jimmie Rodgers' original home territory, from Memphis to Meridian across the Mississippi delta."

If you are in that area, catch one of his appearances at one of the following stores (check their site for times and details):

May 11 - Square Books in Oxford, MS
May 12 - Turnrow Books in Greenwood, MS
May 13 - Lorelei Books in Vicksburg, MS
May 14 - Lemuria Books in Jackson, MS
May 15 - Jimmie Rodgers Museum in Meridian, MS

Music Journalism

2009-05-05T06:24:00.001-07:00

When I started this blog my goal was to, in even a small way, bring some focus and attention to some deserving books on music and musicians. I like a lot of different types of music and wanted a place to be able to put those reviews out there, in one place, so they can, hopefully, turn other people on to some great books they might not otherwise hear about.

I wanted to include interviews with authors because I am deeply interested in the craft of writing and am fascinated to hear an author talk about their writing process and inspirations.

Another reason I started this blog was because there is less and less space for such reviews and interviews in other mediums. I do book reviews for a couple of other sites, but I started out in my limited freelance career doing features and other stories and reviews. Each year I like to set goals for my writing and in 2008 I set five goals. Four of them had to do with making inroads at specific magazines. I put those goals on paper in December of 2007 and by April 2008, three of those four magazines were out of business. A couple tried to move to the Web, but haven't found much luck.

That's perhaps the long way around to saying that I will be adding an occasional post that focuses not on book length writing, but articles of music journalism I find to be a good read. The bottom line is that the blessing and the curse of our new Internet media is that anyone can start a blog or site (just like I did), but that also means that, more often than not, the articles go unchecked by any type of editorial process. There are many good sites out there that feature good, journalistic work, but there are, perhaps, just as many with, at worst, questionable ethics and, at best, a lack of knowledge on their subject.

So, here is the first entry in the new section of this blog.

I've been a fan of The 9513 since the very beginning. I remember when it was two great guys trying to keep in touch with their sister. Now, the site has grown immensely and regularly features a slew of interviews, articles and reviews. Currently on their site there is featured an article by Drew L. Wilson entitled "Just Another King Following In The Footsteps Of The First." The article is a great look at Merle Haggard and his influence and the influence Bob Wills had on him. I recommend checking it out. And if you haven't been to the site before I also recommend the "Forgotten Artist" series by Paul W. Dennis.

Why You Been Gone So Long...

2009-03-11T07:13:00.001-07:00

Well, I apologize for the lack of posts in the past couple of months. There are a few reasons for it, but there are two big ones. The first is burn out. But that's getting better.

The second is the most important. My son was born on Feb. 17 and, really, not much else matters right now.

But I'll be back! Two books I'm excited about are on the horizon. The other day I received a copy of the upcoming Barry Mazor book on Jimmie Rodgers and his influence. I've just started the book, but Barry is hitting on something not touched on before.

The second is the upcoming book by Patsi Bale Cox on the marketing machine that was Garth Brooks. Patsi has a new blog centered on the book here: http://patsibalecox.blogspot.com/

I'll be back, but I can't say when :)

Interview with Ben Ratliff

2009-01-13T06:58:00.000-08:00

Ben Ratliff is a music critic for The New York Times and while he writes on all styles of music, jazz is a specialty of his. He currently has two books on bookshelves. the first is the paperback release of his 2007 book examining the sound of John Coltrane, I>Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. The second is The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music. In it Ratliff sits down with artists like Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Joshua Redman and Branford Marsalis and talks about the music they love. Each interviewee had the opportunity to pick a few recordings that they loved and discuss them with Ratliff.

Music Tomes: When did you first get interested in writing about jazz?

Ben Ratliff: The first time I saw Miles Davis. I was 15 and I thought, you know, somebody could write something great about the details of his performance: why he turns his back on the audience, why he plays those cluster keyboard chords, how he directs the band - and also what the audience expects of him. I didn't have the answers, because I knew nothing, and I'm sure there were plenty such essays already at that time.

Then when I was 19 started reading people like Martin Williams and Gary Giddins and Albert Murray and A. B. Spellman and Robert Palmer, and the kinds of things they were interested in seemed naturally interesting to me too.

MT: You currently have two book on the shelves, The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music and the paperback release of Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. If we can take a moment to talk about each of these. First, your book on Coltrane is written not as a strict biography of the man, but more of a biography of the sound the man created. How did the idea to approach it that way come about?

BR: I don't read big, long, proper biographies for pleasure, because they always feel out of order: I only care about who the great-grandparents were after I know so much about the subject that I can smell him. And I like reporting and fact-finding, but five to ten years of reporting and fact-finding on the same subject didn't appeal to me. I wanted to be able to write a critic's book, basically, but a kind of expressive one. So I set up a framework - first half about his work, second half about his reception - and started writing and it felt right to me.

MT: While Coltrane is one of the most influential jazz figures, he is also offers a complex sound that some find very difficult to get into at first. Do you think your book will help people that are new to his music ease into it?

BR: I honestly don't know. I can tell you that I didn't really write my book in the tone I use when I'm talking to someone who has never heard a note of Coltrane before. Because that would be a very gingerly sort of book.

MT: The Jazz Ear is a series of interesting and innovative interviews with jazz musicians on, not their music, but the music they enjoy listening to. Was that a hard concept to explain to potential interviewees?

BR: They got it right away.

MT: Were there any interesting meetings that didn't make it to the book?

BR: Nope. Not a scrap wasted.

MT: Can you name some up-and-coming jazz musicians to be on the look out for?

BR: Stacy Dillard, John Hebert, Marshall Gilkes, Jonathan Batiste.

MT: What do you find to be the hardest part of the writing process?

BR: The first paragraph. After that you have an idea where you're going.

MT: Why do you feel that what you write about is important?

BR: It's cultural news. And it acknowledges an audience, or presumes that there could be one. Music needs an audience.

MT: In your role as music critic at The New York Times you write about a wide spectrum of music, not just jazz. Any plans to write books on other genres.

BR: Sure, but I can't tell you what they are. I would be disappointing if I didn't deliver.

MT: Any new projects you are working on presently?

BR: I'm between books; About to set up a new series of articles for the paper. Just grazing on local music.

MT: In your 2002 book The Essential Library of Jazz you list Bob Wills, which may surprise some. From your vantage point, do you see much "cross-pollination" between genres like that today?

BR: Much, much more than ever. Musicians of every stripe have sufficient reason to believe that knowing about other genres won't make them traitors to the one that they started in.

MT: Since you have published your list of 100 of the most important jazz recordings, can you name a few essential books on jazz?

BR: A.B. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business, Sidney Bechet, Treat it Gentle, Art Pepper, Straight Life, Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography

Mini-Books?

2009-01-09T06:49:00.000-08:00

Some might consider this a bit of a sidetrack off of the stated focus of this blog - book about music and musicians, but I don't think it truly is. Last night, being between books, I decided I wanted to catch up on something of a favorite of mine, that being liner notes.

Ever since I stumbled upon that stack of records in my Grandma's closet in the second grade, I have been enamored with liner notes. Granted, the majority of those that I found at the time were probably well under 500 words and had to fit on the back of an album cover. And most of them were probably more of a promotionaly blurb than anything else. But, nonetheless, I loved, and still love, running across a name and realizing that he also played drums on these other albums. It is a lamentable lose of the digital movement. (Honestly, the only lamentable part in my opinion)

Over the past few weeks I have come to acquire a few great boxed sets and deluxe edition re-issues, each holding a well-written mini-book within. Last night I made my way eagerly through the Rich Kienzle-penned notes to the new re-issue of Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys' Tiffany Transcriptions. After that, Colin Escotts' notes to the new Unreleased Hank Williams set. Both great and informative reads.

Liner notes, especially those found in boxed sets of good re-issues, are the unsung hero of music writing. These are essays mostly written by an expert in the artist (as exemplified by Escott and Kienzle) and give the author an opportunity to expand on a specific moment in the time of the artists career. They aren't often of great length, but, the good ones, can provide great info on the artist and the selected recording.

Going beyond the standard liner note booklet are the fantastic books (real books, albe they short) that Bear Family often includes in their boxed set. These often fill a gap in the information that is out there, as is the case with the book included in the Red Foley set released a couple of years ago. With all of the influence Red Foley had on country music and the country music industry, there is no full-length biography written about him or his impact. This small book (less than 100 pages, but hardcover) is all that exists of a collected history of one of country musics' greats.

So I raise my Vanilla Diet Pepsi in a toast to the writers of liner notes and the record companies that still include the well thoughout, well-researched information within their jewel cases.

Interview with Josh Hunter

2009-01-07T05:24:00.000-08:00

Today we continue our interview with the team that has released the new book The 27s with an interview with artist Josh Hunter. Hunter's beautiful illustrations play as much a part of bringing the story together as writer Eric Segalstad's narrative. His use of color and blending media set the book apart from anything else on the shelf. Below are a couple of illustrations, but you can see more at the books Web site The 27s.

Music Tomes: The layout of the book, which is beautiful, makes great use of mixed media like the illustrations and photographs. How did you approach the general layout?

Josh Hunter: Thank you. The original concept was simple – a single illustration accompanied by bio. But, over the course of putting this project together, that concept unfurled to reveal many different layers of The 27s story – numerology, philosophy, astrology and even in music history. It was important that the art echoed this.

MT: What inspired the comic sequence with Keith Richards toward the end of the book?

JH: That particular section focuses primarily on the history of the number 27, dating back to the philosophies of Pythagoras. We felt like it was a meaty section that ran the risk of becoming too academic – so we had this idea of creating a comic book strip to help lead the reader through the terminology. And, having Keith as the narrator who grows older as we move through the past was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.

MT: Who are some of your influences?

JH: Too many – Wes Wilson, Matisse, Alex Ross, Don Southard, Egon Schiele, Connor Harrington, Van Gogh, Tomer Hanuka, Frank Stockton, Peter Max...

MT: While the book isn't broken into chapters, it seems certain sections are tied together by a common color palette. Was that an initial choice or just started to fall into place?

JH: We begin the book with 2 pages of pure black and 300 pages later we end the book with spreads of white. The color palettes were quite specific to the artist's music and my own interpretation of their stories. For Jeremy Ward's section, I wanted the reader to feel that heavy sense of eerie atmosphere the way the music of the Mars Volta sounds to me. The visual breaks and intensities with color were intended to add ambience to the story Eric was writing.

MT: How did the collaboration between you and Eric work? Did you work on the design as he finished sections?

JH: I began The 27s artwork by creating a few individual portraits of musicians to find a style for the art. Then I began designing around Eric’s introduction and Robert Johnson’s story but we were never too far off from one another. It actually worked out very well this way because we were always working around the same musicians and could share and discuss our thoughts for how the text and art could better interact.

Interview with Eric Segalstad

2009-01-06T05:55:00.001-08:00

The 27s is a book that weaves the stories of several disparate artists into one narrative. The only thing the artists have in common - their death at age 27. Author Eric Segalstad and artist Josh Hunter have released an innovative book weaving the stories of these artist together through the course of music history. Starting with the well-trod story of Robert Johnson and making their way through history to the present their stories cross and affect one another in surprising ways.

Today's interview is with author Eric Segalstad and tomorrow I will be featuring an interview with artist Josh Hunter. Be sure to check the book out at www.the27s.com.

Music Tomes: Where did the idea to do a book on the 27 myth first come from?

Eric Segalstad: I think both Josh and I talked about how it would be fun "doing something" on The 27s. The idea of the book came a few years into our friendship when I visited him at the Chicago Art Institute. We had a couple brews at a downtown pub and the idea of the book came up. You know, we found it both very strange that nobody had written anything substantial on The 27s and as soon as we started talking about creating this book we spent hours brainstorming what this book should be all about. The main concepts remained throughout the project.

MT: At what point in the process did you decide to make it one continuous narrative, not breaking the book into chapters?

ES: At first we thought the way to create this was a quick bio on each 27 with a couple of illustrations, but as I dug deeper into the research and discovered more and more 27s I searched for a narrative arc - something that bound them altogether on a different level than the common age of their departures. That's when I realized that The 27s tell the history of rock & roll; it's various sub genres, the multifarious facets of artistdom, and so on. The lack of chapters came from the essay format and the notion that the design broke the piece neatly into unannounced "chapters."

MT: Did that present any particular challenges?

ES: Even though the design breaks it up for the reader I worked on the manuscript on Word and obviously wanted to make it read as a complete piece without any awkward stops or transitions. Every sentence is an excuse for the reader to put whatever she's reading down, so I knew it had to work independently on a very basic level. It took me some time and rewrites to make certain sections work the way I wanted them to.
Another challenge was telling the story of the sixties in that intertwined way. It was a big push, but here the problem wasn't for the lack of transitions - those were everywhere. Alan Wilson, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and so on, were contemporaries whose lives intertwined and ran parallel to one another, so the challenge was to pack all that info into that section which probably makes up a quarter of The 27s.

MT: The book covers a wide range of music from blues to rock to hip-hop and must have required a large amount of research into the various genres and artists. Were there any surprises that you ran across in your research?

ES: Sure, lot's of little surprises. The biggie for me occurred when I realized that Dyke And The Blazers wrote and recorded the first real funk song: "Funky Broadway." James Brown slimmed down his band after The Blazers' single hit it BIG and had them play in a loose, syncopated groove. JB's first post-"Funky Broadway" single was "Cold Sweat"--arguably his first funky recording (everything he did prior to that was soul). The late, great JB even quotes "funky, funky Broadway" on that disc. So the surprise was that Arlester "Dyke" Christian is the forgotten father of funk.

MT: What was the idea behind the timeline that runs across the bottom of most of the book?

ES: The timeline was first proposed by Josh, I think. The idea was to provide quick pop cultural, historic, political, and musical placeholders that could work in tandem with the narrative. It was a lot of fun to put that together, actually. I think my favorite entry is that the CD, the McNugget, the Swatch watch, and the original 8-bit Nintendo all came out the same year: 1983.

Welcome to the New Year!

2009-01-05T08:35:00.000-08:00

Welcome back! I thought it would be good to start the first post of the new year off with a new releases list. so below is a list of releases I think will be interesting. It is by no means complete or exhaustive. If I have missed something (which I am sure I have), please leave your suggestion in the comments and I'll add it to the list.

I have a new interview and a couple of reviews ready to go. Since the beginning of the blog I've focused pretty heavily on country music related books, but for the next couple of weeks, at least, I'll be focusing a little on blues and rock. One reason is there isn't a whole lot out of interest related to country music right now (although I do have one country related book to read sitting on my shelf). Another reason is that, as much as I love country, I also love a lot of other genres, so this years you can expect to see coverage of books on country, bluegrass, jazz, rock, soul and R & B.

Without further ado, new releases:
Jan. 15:
Joel Whitburn Presents Music Stars: Brief Bios of Thousands of Pop/Rock/RandB/Hip-Hop/Country and Adult Contemporary Recording Artists by Joel Whitburn (Record Research)

Feb. 1:
Love Me Tender: The Stories Behind the World's Best-loved Songs by Max Cryer (Frances Lincoln)

Feb. 2:
Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry (Paperback Edition) by Holly George-Warren (Oxford University Press)

Feb. 24:
Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with the Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It) by Bill German (Villard)

Mar. 9:
The Supremes: A Saga of Motown, Success, and Betrayal by Mark Ribowsky (Da Capo Press)

April 1:
Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America's Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century by Barry Mazor (Oxford University Press)

April 6:
Black Tooth Grin: The High Life, Good Times, and Tragic End of "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott by Zac Crain (Da Capo Press)

May 2009:
Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity by Leigh Edwards (Indiana University Press)
Kristofferson: Wild American by Stephen Miller (Omnibus)

June 5, 2009:
How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music by Elijah Wald (Oxford University Press)

July 2009:
The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Legacy in Country Music by Jocelyn R. Neal (Indiana University Press)

Happy Holidays!

2008-12-24T05:59:00.001-08:00

I wanted to take a minute and thank all of you who have been regular readers of the blog and to those new readers who are just discovering it. I've only been doing this blog for three months and the response has been great. I hope that I am able to help, in some small way, to get the word out on some releases that hadn't gotten much attention and that you, the reader, will be able to add some great books to your library.

I also wanted to thank, one more time, the great companies who have been supportive of the blog by providing books to giveaway. So a special thanks to: Hachette, University of Illinois Press, JawBone Press, Faber & Faber, University of Texas Press, and Gibbs-Smith Publishing.

This will be the last post until January 5. I'll be back then with new reviews and interviews that I am excited about. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions as to what other types of things you would like to see covered on the site, I'd be happy to hear the suggestions. Either leave them in the comments or drop me an e-mail.

Thanks again!

Review: Country Music: The Masters by Marty Stuart

2008-12-22T05:27:00.000-08:00

If my country music geek credentials are ever in question, let it be remembered that to cap off my Honeymoon in 2007, my new bride and I made a stop over in Nashville for the sole purpose of checking out the Country Music Hall of Fame and to visit the State Museum to see the Marty Stuart exhibit “Sparkle and Twang,” Stuart’s collection of country music memorabilia.

In the museum gift shop, there was a book on display. The chiseled black and white visage of Johnny Cash on a large hardbound book stared across the room. My wife and I picked it up and thumbed through a few of the pictures that made up the book and then gently placed it back in its place. It contained such beautiful photos, some of which were displayed in the exhibit, but the $100 price tag kept us from leaving the store with it.

But it stayed in our minds.

Almost a year later, on another trip to Nashville with some friends, we took them through the Country Music Hall of Fame. When we entered the gift shop we saw a sign announcing that Marty Stuart would be there that day to sign copies of his new book, Country Music; The Masters. There is sat, again, staring at us from afar. And this time it was on sale - $89.99 and we could take it home with Marty Stuart’s signature. As beautiful as this book was, printed on archive quality paper, linen bound, I decided to walk away.

But now, now, the book has returned. A small publisher picked up the book, printed in on less costly (but not cheaper) material and I finally have the book in my possession. The cover price has been cut in half (although you can get it on Amazon for under $40), but the beauty of the book has not been.

The title says it all - Country Music: The Masters. Johnny Cash, whose last portrait, taken just 4 days before his passing, makes up the cover image and the last image in the book. Merle Haggard. George Jones. Loretta Lynn. Lester Flatt. Bill Monroe. Jimmy Martin. Eddy Arnold. Buck Owens. Porter Wagoner. And so many more. These are the masters. These are the artists that command our respect and deserve to be remembered by in a book of this quality.

There are many straightforward portraits in these pages. Vern Gosdin, Gene Watson, Johnny Wright, Kitty Wells, they all look out from the pages in a stately manner, their faces etched with age and experience, their posture recounting the hundreds of days on the road.

There are fun pictures, too. Stuart remembers, in the books’ introduction, how he made it to Nashville and in turn how he began to take pictures of these legendary artists: “I was fourteen and I couldn’t drive. In order for me to go anywhere I had to go along with Lester, and his buddies became mine. Bill Monroe, Ernest Tubb, Stringbean, Grandpa Jones Jones, and Roy Acuff became my poker pals, fishing buddies, and musical compadres. It seemed an important event very time any combination of those men got together.” There is a picture of Bill Monroe playing mandolin for his chickens, Emmylou Harris striking a playful pose backstage in Italy, pictures of guitars, pictures of posters and concerts.

There are those pictures that carry heartbreak. The aforementioned Johnny cash portrait. A series of pictures of the crash site where the spirits of Patsy cline, Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Randy Hughes left this earth. Lester Flatt being helped from the bus and relaxing on the bus taking oxygen to be able to continue to entertain the fans. A picture of a flea market booth carry the personal belongings of Skeeter Davis after her passing, all marked $5 each.

If you have Stuarts’ book Pilgrims: Sinner, Saints and Prophets a few of these pictures will be familiar, although they are presented here in a large format and with new layouts surrounding them.

These are pictures of history and historical figures seen through the lens of an artist who will soon join them in that elite group. Stuart has and had access to the greats of the genre and he has shared them with us.

One thing this edition includes that the original release did not is an accompanying CD. This CD adds so much value to fans of country music history in general and Marty Stuart in particular. There are 21 tracks on the disc, including the song Stuart wrote for the passing of Cash, “Dark Bird,” which is only available here (although there is live version recorded as part of a radio show that was sold only at Stuart’s shows). There are three instrumental tracks containing Stuarts great mandolin and guitar playing that serve as musical interludes between the other tracks.

The remaining 17 tracks correspond with 17 pictures throughout the book, denoted by a small CD with a number on it in the corner of the page. The track tells a story relating to the photo you are looking at, telling of the circumstances and events surrounding the picture. This is like sitting down with Stuart and going through the book and having him talk you through it. Funny stories, touching stories, bits of trivia, it’s all here.

I know it is a little close to Christmas to get someone this gift on time, but, trust me, they won’t mind getting it a little late. Hey, I waited over a year!

Giveaway Winners!

2008-12-19T07:04:00.000-08:00

The winners of the two prize packs are: Mitchell and Leeann! They will each receive copies of Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain by Robert K. Oermann, The Hayloft Gang edited by Chad Berry, Sing Me Back Home by Dana Jennings and No Depression #76.

A Big special thanks to Hachette, University of Illinois Press, Faber & Faber and University of Texas Press for providing the great books.

A bit of housekeeping: I will probably only have only a couple of posts between now and the New Year (Monday will be a review for a book that will be a must on any country music fans wishlist). I want to thank all of you for the kind and encouraging words left in the comments. I hope people can learn a little more about some deserving new releases through the site!

Interview with Alan Govenar

2008-12-18T06:02:00.000-08:00

When I received the press release for the book Texas Blues by Alan Govenar (Texas A & M Press), I thought it looked like a good read. I am about half way through reading a book on the Delta Blues, so I requested the book. A few days latter there was a box on my doorstep. Now, usually when I get a book it is a good strudy envelope, but this was a box. Inside was Texas Blues. This thing weighs in at around 11" by 8" and is over 600 pages long, including discographical info and indexes. It is like a text bok for Texas blues. Dividing the state into regions (with a couple sections specific to style or instrument), Govenar presents here an in-depth oral history of Texas blues, using interviews with the artists themselves to tell their own story of the music. The book is also filled with rare and beautiful pictures of the artists at leisure and at work.

This is Mr. Govenar's sixth book on the blues and his research runs deep. I appreciate Mr. Govenar taking the time to give his thoughts on the book and his work.

Music Tomes: How did you first become interested in the blues?

Alan Govenar: My interest in the blues dates back to when I was four years old in the inner city of Boston. The first LPs I remember my father bringing home were The Twelve Top Hits of 1956, an anthology of rhythm and blues and early rock 'n' roll, and a jazz and blues compilation that included Sarah Vaughn, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.

MT: Your newest book, Texas Blues, is quite impressive! It is like a text book for the blues. You mention in the book that you formed the idea for the book in 1987, and you went on to publish five books on the blues between that time and now. How did those books inform what you did in "Texas Blues" and vice versa?

AG: I had studied Texas blues in a folklore class when I was a junior at Ohio State University in 1973, but when I moved to Austin to go to graduate school, I was surprised that there were no books on the subject. I had read the books of Paul Oliver and Sam Charters, who both covered different facets of the history of Texas blues, but did not explore the influence of T-Bone Walker. In 1984, I got a commission from the Dallas Museum of Art to do a project, called "Living Texas Blues," which involved the writing of a small book, the production of three short films, and the compilation of an anthology of recordings to show how the growth of Texas blues paralleled the emergence of a regional style of painting among a group of painters known as "The Dallas Nine." This project became the basis of my book Meeting the Blues: The Rise of the Texas Sound, which in turn led to The Early Years of Rhythm Blues: The Photography of Benny Joseph and Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged (which I co-authored with Jay Brakefield). All of these books inform Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound, but about 30-40% of the book represents new research, especially as it relates to the discussion of the blues antecedents in the 19th century and to younger, cross-over musicians on the scene today. The idea was to bring together elements of my earlier work to present a more comprehensive overview.

MT: Texas Blues is over 500 pages long (not counting dicographical information and indexes), was there ever a point that you felt like it might be getting too big? That you might need to narrow the scope?

AG: I wanted to be as inclusive as possible, not only as it related to the text, but to the photographs and ephemera associated with the music. There were many color of photographs of mine that had never been published, as well as numerous images in the collections of the Texas African American Photography Archive, which I co-founded with Kaleta Doolin. While the book is big and comprehensive, it is by no means definitive. There is still more work to be done.

MT: What was the hardest part of putting the book together?

AG: The most difficult part of compiling the book was providing a cohesiveness that unified the text, photographs, and ephemera. While in many instances the photographs and ephemera illustrate points made in the text, this is not uniformly the case. The history of Texas blues is intrinsically fragmentary, and through these oral histories, narratives, and visual images, the vast scope of the music comes into view.

MT: There are other areas that are associated with the blue and when they are brought up, you get a good idea of what the sound is. for instance when people talk about the Chicago Blues, most people think of those early electric guitar recordings of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, while if you mention Piedmont you think of finger-style acoustic. Texas blues, on the other hand, can cover all of those things, from acoustic to electric and several points in between. What is it about the state that causes the music to be so diverse?

AG: In Texas, the blues developed a unique character that resulted from the cross-pollination of musical styles — itself an outcome of the migratory patterns of African Americans and the growth of the recording industry. Not only is the African American population of Texas less concentrated than that of other states in the South, blues music in the region evolved in proximity to other important traditions: the rural Anglo, the Cajun and Creole, the Hispanic, and the Eastern and Central European.

MT: How did you decide to break the books into regions rather than assemble the stories by artist or style?

AG: In many ways, the diversity of Texas blues stems from the geographical regions in which the music was performed. What unifies these variations is the influence of the electric guitar and its interplay with a distinctive saxophone sound, and consequently, I have devoted sections to these instruments. In addition, I felt the need to have a Zydeco section, because it feeds from and into the Texas blues. Breaking the book into geographical regions was a way to better understand the immensity of the state and how a particular approach to music can be rooted in different communities. This was probably more true from a historical perspective. In the contemporary sound, these distinctions are, to some extent, artificial. Texas Blues delves into the roots of regionalism, but ultimately demonstrates through the stories of younger musicians how regional identity has become somewhat irrelevant in the worlds of cyberspace and mass media communication.

MT: The book is made up of several interviews and a lot of great pictures, many taken by yourself. Is there an experience or two that stands out about some of those pictures?

AG: The photograph of the couple dancing (p. x) opposite the acknowledgements page is one of my favorites. I had tried so many times to photograph the energy of the dance scene associated with Texas blues, especially the vitality of the Monday night shows at the Longhorn Ballroom during the 1980s. For me, this photograph epitomizes that power and elegance. Other favorites are two women at the Longhorn Ballroom (p.111), Robert Ealey (p.182), Clyde Langford (p. xx), the birthday celebration for Guitar Slim (Rayfield Jackson) in Houston (p. 313) and countless others.

MT: In the introduction you tell a great story about looking for the grave of Blind Lemon Jefferson and that leading to visiting the home of a couple of elderly ladies who, it seems, couldn't have cared less. Who was the most difficult subject to track down or interview?

AG: The elderly women I met when researching stories about Blind Lemon were actually quite interested in what I was doing. While one of the women was not exactly sure of my motives, she was concerned that perhaps, I didn't know that Blind Lemon had died so long ago. I never think of the process of fieldwork and research as difficult. I enjoy looking and driving around, talking to people and finding a way to photograph and record what I experienced.

MT: What projects are you currently working on?

AG: I am currently finishing a biography of the bluesman Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins, to be published next year by Chicago Review Press. I am also completing two books with Don Ed Hardy, the first of which will be published in the Spring 2009 by teNeues. In addition, I am designing and making the multimedia for Le Museé Franco Américan du château de Blérancourt in France and completing two films, one on Simon Shaheen, the Palestinian violinist and oud player, and the other on Qi Shu Fang and her Beijing Opera Company.

MT: Why do you feel the subjects you write about are important?

AG: Too many histories of the blues take a very authoritative tone, focused more on the interpretations of the author than the perspective of the subjects. I wanted to give the subjects of my book the opportunity to speak for themselves, to establish their own points of view, even if it meant what they had to say was sometimes inexact and impressionistic. Through the stories of these blues artists, we can get a clearer understanding of the complex relations between myth, memory, and history.

MT: Can you recommend some other books on the subject that you consider essential reading?

AG: I'd recommend the books of Paul Oliver: The Story of the Blues, Conversation with the Blues, Blues off the Record: Thirty Years of Blues Commentary, Broadcasting the Blues: Black Blues in the Segregation Era. Also, Roger Wood's books Down in Houston and Texas Zydeco, Charles Wolfe & Kip Lornell's Leadbelly, and Gary Hartman's History of Texas Music. My books, Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged, which I co-authored with Jay Brakefield and The Early Years of Rhythm and Blues: The Photography of Benny Joseph also help elucidate the context in which Texas blues emerges as a regional sound. For young readers, check out my books, Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper's Daughter and Stompin' at the Savoy: The Story of Norma Miller.

New Giveaway!

2008-12-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

As the year winds down I'd like to thank everyone who has been a reader of this blog. I hope that you've discovered some books you might not have otherwise and I hope that my author interview have helped you get to know some of the authors and their motivations for bringing you the information they do.

In the next couple of weeks I will mainly be posting about some of my favorite books of the year. There have been a lot of great books this year, whether it was a music biography or an in-depth study on a given topic.

To help celebrate the end of the year and a good start to this blog, I am offering up two (2) prize packs with some of my favorite books from the last quarter of 2008. Here is what each contains:
No Depression #76 - this is the "bookazine" that has taken up the ND mantle and offers more of the coverage and articles you've come to expect from ND.
Behind The Grand Ole Opry Curtain by Robert K. Oermann - if you didn't win one last time, here is your chance.
Sing Me Back Home by Dana Jennings - a great read I will be discussing soon.
The Hayloft Gang edited by Chad Berry - One of my top five of the year.

Thanks to University of Texas Press, Hachette, Faber & Faber and The University of Illinois Press for providing these great books!

So, just leave a comment to sign up for this drawing! The winner will be announced Friday, Dec. 19. (Unfortunalte this contest is only open to US residents. If you are entering the drawing, and I don't know who you are, you MUST leave an e-mail address to be entered. Enteries without an e-mail address (either left or in profile) will be disqualified.)

Good Luck!

Interview with Chad Berry

2008-12-11T06:43:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite books of this year has been The Hayloft Gang, edited by Chad Berry. The book draws together the work of several scholars to examine the place and importance of Chicago's National Barn Dance. This dance preceeded the Grand Ole Opry and served as an influential exporter of country music in the 1930's and 1940's. It's place in country music history has been overshadowed by the Grand Ole Opry and this book takes steps to help correct that. The book is also a compainion book to a film on the National Barn Dance that will be released on PBS stations in the Fall of 2009, a film I am greatly anticipating. You can read my review of The Hayloft Gang here.

Chad Berry was gracious enough to take some time from his busy schedule and do an interview about the book.

Music Tomes: When did you get interested in Appalachian studies?

Chad Berry: I became interested in Appalachian Studies as a high school student. I became interested in my family history, and I learned that my family once lived amid the Great Smoky Mountains. Then, in graduate school, I pursued a master’s degree in folk studies at an institution that catered especially to southern and Appalachian folklore. In a Ph.D. program, I pursued a dissertation topic that included Appalachian studies. So, for many years, I’ve been a student of Appalachia.

MT: How did you get involved as editor of "The Hayloft Gang"?

CB: It came about after an interview that Steve Parry conducted with me. Steve is the producer of the documentary about the National Barn Dance. As we were talking, he was lamenting how he’d love to see a companion volume to the film. And of course I immediately said, “We could do that!” The vision of “The Hayloft Gang” is wholly Steve’s. He has given the project herculean work and energy. I simply contacted scholars and pursued work on the collection of articles.

MT: Why do you feel that the Nation Barn Dance is often relegated to a lower tier when country music history is discussed?

CB: I think the “Nashville paradigm” is powerful. There are hundreds of millions of dollars behind it. Once it was established, after World War II, it simply became easy for many folks to believe that “country music” was born there. Our book and especially the film will check that paradigm.

MT: The book covers a nice range of study on the National Barn Dance, from a history of it from a musical standpoint to its place in radio history to the roles of women in both the history of radio and the barn dance. How did the structure of the book shape up?

CB: Steve was instrumental in suggesting names and topics. I approached it as an endeavor of trying to study and learn about a piece of cultural history from as many angles as possible. An important point we try to make is that this was not just a radio program. It was that and more. In particular, it was a reflection and a representation of mid-century American cultural history. We can learn about the performers as well as the listeners by studying the NBD.

MT: Did you choose the writers for each section? How were they chosen?

CB: Yes, they were chosen based on their interest in the project as well as their past research.

MT: Why do you feel it is important to write about the National Barn Dance?

CB: Reading about the Barn Dance tells us not just about the NBD but about who we were then. It tells us about gender, about music, about region, about rural-urban issues, about mass culture, economics and marketing, even about race (what, for example, “whiteness” means) and region (such as conceptions of “Appalachia” or “The West”).

MT: What are some books that you consider essential reading?

CB: Wow. Big question. I think Bill C. Malone, Richard A. Peterson, Kris McCusker, Anthony Harkins, Michael Ann Williams, Wayne Daniel, Michele Hilmes, Susan J. Douglas, and D. K. Wilgus are all important authors. If I identify some people, then others will feel left out. Hey—I know—buy the book and look in the notes section of each chapter!

Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Giveaway Winners

2008-12-03T07:07:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all of you who entered to win a copy of Robert K. Oermann's book! A big thanks also to Hachette for providing the books for the giveaway.

The winners are:
That Nashville Sound
Dan
Baron Lane

Congratulations to our winners!

The next giveaway will be in a couple of weeks and it is a big one, so make sure you come back for that.

New and Upcoming Releases

2008-12-01T10:41:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a great Holiday weekend. Here is a list of new and upcoming releases running from Nov. 1 (in case you missed some Nov. releases) through February 2009. New additions to the list are in bold.

Don' forget to go here and sign up to win a copy of Robert K Oermann's Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain courteous of Music Tomes and Hachette.

Nov. 1:
Country Music: The Masters by Marty Stuart (Sourcebooks MediaFusion)
Hot Burritos: The True Story of The Flying Burrito Brothers by John Einarson with Chris Hillman (Jawbone Press)
Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music by Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching (University of Michigan Press)
Southern Fiddlers and Fiddle Contests by Chris Goertzen (University Press of Mississippi)
Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis by Paul Maher Jr. and Michael K. Dorr (Editors) (Lawrence Hill Books)

Nov. 4:
Born Country: How Faith, Family, and Music Brought Me Home by Randy Owen (HarperOne)

Nov. 11:
Sinatra in Hollywood by Tom Santopietro (Thomas Dunne Books)
The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music by Ben Ratliff (Times Books)
The Hit Charade: Lou Pearlman, Boy Bands, and the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in U.S. History by Tyler Gray (Collins)
The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey & Passions: Photos, Letters, Memories & More from Q’s Personal Collection by Quincy Jones (Insight Editions)

Nov. 17:
Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods by Annie J. Randall (Oxford University Press)

Nov. 19:
Country Music Humorists and Comedians by Loyal Jones (University of Illinois Press)

Nov. 24:
Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake (Da Capo Press)

Nov. 28:
A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States: Feasts of Musical Celebration by Ronald D. Cohen (The Scarecrow Press)

Nov. 30:
Mods, Rockers, and the Music of the British Invasion by James E. Perone (Praeger Publishers)

Dec. 1:
Pure Country: The Leon Kagarise Archives, 1961-1971 by Eddie Dean (Daniel 13/Process)
The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop - and Why It Matters by Tricia Rose (Basic Civitas Books)
The Lennon Prophecy: A New Examination of the Death Clues of the Beatles by Joseph Niezgoda (New Chapter Press)

Dec. 8:
Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life by Brian Raftery (Da Capo Press)

Dec. 9:
Pass Thru Fire: The Collected Lyrics by Lou Reed (Da Capo Press)

Dec. 16:
The Foundations of Rock: From "Blue Suede Shoes" to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" by Walter Everett (Oxford University Press)

Dec. 25:
Waiting for a Train: Jimmie Rodgers's America by Mary E. Davis (Rounder Books)
Sundays with Sullivan: How the Ed Sullivan Show Brought Elvis, the Beatles, and Culture to America by Bernie Ilson (Taylor Trade Publishing)

Dec. 30:
Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia by Robert Greenfield (Plexus Publishing)
Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of the Beatles' Utopian Dream by Kevin Courrier (Praeger Publishers)

Dec. 2008:
Piano Man: The Billy Joel Story by Bill Smith (Book Republic Press)

Jan. 15:
Joel Whitburn Presents Music Stars: Brief Bios of Thousands of Pop/Rock/RandB/Hip-Hop/Country and Adult Contemporary Recording Artists by Joel Whitburn (Record Research)

Feb. 1:
Love Me Tender: The Stories Behind the World's Best-loved Songs by Max Cryer (Frances Lincoln)

Feb. 2:
Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry (Paperback Edition) by Holly George-Warren (Oxford University Press)

Feb. 24:
Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with the Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It) by Bill German (Villard)

Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Giveaway

2008-11-26T06:10:00.000-08:00

Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain is the newest book by Robert K. Oermann and is filled with stories about the artists who make up the Opry family. (You can read my review of the book here and my interview with Mr. Oermann here)

I am a big fan of the Opry and its history. I have had the chance to go to several Opry shows, most at the historic Ryman Auditorium, and see some great artists. When my wife and I first started dating, that was one of the first day-trips we took. We drove three hours, hung out in Nashville, went to the Opry at the Ryman and then headed home.

Probably one of my favorite "Opry Moments" was getting to see Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings do a 25 minute set together on the stage of the Ryman. They played as a group for the entire segment and it was a lot of fun.

Thanks to Hachette Book Group, I have three copies of Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain to give away. All you need to do is leave a comment telling your favorite "Opry moment" or why you love the Opry. Please leave an email address if you are entering the contest. If there is no email address attached, and I don't know who you are, you will not be entered into the drawing. I'll announce the winners next Wednesday (12/3). Good Luck!

Interview with Diane Pecknold

2008-11-25T05:46:00.000-08:00

You will notice that in nearly every interview I do on this site I ask the author for suggestions on what they feel is essential reading. In the first two interview for this site, Patsi Bale Cox and Barry Mazor, they both recommended The Selling Sound by Diane Pecknold. The book is an excellent study on the rise of the country music industry and blends elements of media studies, sociology and business history into a cohesive story that examines not country music, but the industry and its inner workings. (For an excellent review go here.) Since this book is popping up on more lists around the blogosphere, I thought I would contact the author, Diane Pecknold, and she was nice enough to do the following interview with me.

Music Tomes: When did you first become interested in country music?

Diane Pecknold: It seems like everyone who writes about country music has a story about listening to it as a youngster. I grew up in Urbana, Illinois, a tiny Midwestern university town where the rural/cosmopolitan divide was heavily patrolled. Since I (hilariously enough, in retrospect) thought I was on the cosmopolitan side, country music was not on the playlist.
Oddly, in high school I was an enormous fan of what people now might call early alt.country (I am still frequently ridiculed because I refuse to renounce Jason and the Scorchers and Lone Justice), but at the time I thought of it as specifically American punk or independent rock rather than a kind of country.

I didn’t really start paying attention to mainstream country until I met my husband after college. It was the era of New Traditionalists, and he was listening to a lot of Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam, in addition to the classics. So I came to country late, but once I gave it a fair listen, I found it a lot more interesting than most rock.

MT: Your book covers the commercialization of the country music industry and includes aspects of media study, sociological profiling and business history. Was it difficult to meld these into a cohesive narrative? How did you originally envision the book?

DP: The book was not originally supposed to be about country music at all. Country music was meant to be just one chapter in a book that explored the commodification of rural life after World War II. I was going to look at state fairs and shopping malls and tourism and a bunch of other stuff. I started with the country chapter just because it was the one I was most interested in personally, and it kept growing. I found so much incredibly rich source material that hadn’t been touched on in the literature that I couldn’t walk away from it or limit it. For that, I owe an eternal debt to John Rumble at the Hall of Fame. Country music probably would have remained just a chapter if he hadn’t shown me the Joe Allison papers. Once I saw those and the scripts for the Country Music Association trade shows, I knew I couldn’t possibly get through it all in a single chapter.

In most ways, the project had a life and will of its own. The synthesis of approaches just came naturally out of the sources. I wanted to know how people felt about the music they listened to and promoted, and the shape of the business was often an important factor in those feelings. I also found pretty quickly that people in the industry and audience (and the larger world of cultural criticism) were talking to each other, and wanted to be visible to each other, so it came together as a single story pretty clearly on its own. The only real problem from that vantage point was finding audience voices. I actually finished a complete version of the manuscript before I found the best fan material, and went back and restructured when I came across the K-Bar-T Roundup newsletter.

MT: Do you feel this was an area of study that hadn't been touched upon?

DP: There was certainly already some significant work in the area, which has since grown. Richard Peterson’s Creating Country Music did a similar kind of analysis for an earlier period. Bill Ivey’s chapter in Country: The Music and the Musicians, was also tremendously helpful, and pointed me in the direction of the CMA sales shows. Don Cusic knows just about everything there is to know about the mechanics of the contemporary industry, and had done several articles on the economics of country. So there were lots of good models for doing a business genre. But none of them offered an in-depth analysis of the moment I was most interested in. I felt that Peterson’s story basically ended before the bulk of the current industry’s institutional development took place, and Ivey’s article was obviously limited in scope. Cusic’s work at the time tended to focus on the economy of the 1990s boom. I was more concerned with figuring out what happened as Nashville became a separate industry parallel to but fully articulated with the rest of the popular music business. A lot of very entertaining and helpful exposé journalism had been written on the business during the Nashville Sound era — especially Paul Hemphill’s The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music. Joli Jensen’s The Nashville Sound had explored the dynamics of authenticity and commercialism during the period I was interested in, but I didn’t think it had given a full enough account of the basic history (mainly because that wasn’t her aim).

I also felt that most of the work out there either tacitly assumed that commercialism was a corrosive force, or at best that the concept didn’t have any cultural meaning, the way authenticity did. And I thought the audience had gotten short shrift (with the exception of Curtis Ellison’s Country Music Culture), and that most analyses had tended to portray them the way early twentieth-century cultural critics had thought of them: as passive dupes. I wanted to provide as complete an institutional history as I could — including an understanding of the way it imagined and interacted with the audience — and to try to understand better how that institutional history shaped the way the genre has been viewed.

MT: Why do you feel what you write about is important?

DP: I’ve always been a big fan of popular music, and it has always seemed to me that blanket condemnations of commercialism don’t accomplish much. The truth is we rely on capitalism to expand and preserve musical practice. What can’t be commercialized (and here I mean everything from local shows and burned CDs to Sony/BMG) quickly becomes moribund. Even the die-hardest anti-commercial purists expect to get paid to show up and play, even if it’s only a few bucks. I was really interested in getting to a level of specificity about the very different forms commercialism can take and how those different forms shape production, distribution, and audience experience.

I also have a personal investment in this issue. I spent a lot of time as a teenager and young adult around people in various aspects of the music business. Needless to say, these weren’t the David Geffens of the world; they were mostly what you would call DIY independent music entrepreneurs, but many of them became very successful. I always had a hard time reconciling the evil image of “the music industry” with this set of people who were so genuinely passionate about what they did and the cultural contribution they thought they were making. Maybe because I have neither myself, I see business acumen as a kind of creativity that ought to be accorded the same respect as musical talent.

MT: You are involved with a few upcoming projects, can you give us a little information on these?

DP: I’m currently working on an edited collection about African American participation in country music. Over the past decade and a half, there’s been more and more attention to the black stringbands, banjo-playing, and the country work of people like Joe Tex, Solomon Burke and Ray Charles, but it’s scattered in articles and books in a lot of different disciplines and genres. The collection is partly an effort to bring it all together in one place as a cohesive narrative, a project
that was obviously so far beyond my expertise that it needed to be a group effort. I’m hoping to follow up with a book that is more limited in scope, focusing on the 1950s forward.

Hot Burritos Winner!

2008-11-24T05:34:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all of the people that signed up for the giveaway, and a BIG thanks to Jawbone Press for providing a copy of Hot Burritos.

This week's lucky winner is Patrick! Congratulations, Patrick, if you can contact me in the next couple of days I can get that sent to you.

For those of you who didn't win, be sure to pick up a copy of this book at the bookstore and come back Wednesday for another great giveaway.

Review: So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star by Christopher Hjort

2008-11-21T06:43:00.000-08:00

The Byrds are one of the most influential American rock groups and served as a training ground for musicians who would go on to influence music outside of the group. David Crosby went on to form Crosby, Stills and Nash. Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke co-founded, with Gram Parsons, who also spent time in the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers. Gene Clark formed the Dillard & Clark Expedition with Doug Dillard and produced some fantastic solo work.

Founding member Roger McGuinn would be the only Byrd to play in all incarnations of the Byrds helping to guide and mold the Byrds sound with his jangly Rickenbacker guitar. Starting in 1965 he maintained the group until disbanding the band in 1973.

From the jingle-jangle sound of the Dylan-penned “Mr. Tambourine Man” to the spacey “Eight Miles High” to the countrified Sweetheart of the Rodeo and beyond, the group influenced other ‘60s bands and continue to influence artists today.

The subtitle of So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star is “The Byrds Day-By-Day 1965-1973.” Author Christopher Hjort, who used the same format for his book Strange Brew: Eric Clapton & The British Blues Boom 1965-1970, which is, as the title states, a day by day account of the band, from their formation to their break up.

The information is presented in a calendar-like format. The present tense writing takes a minute to get adjusted to, but the reason for its use is that Hjort uses the material from magazines, interviews, books and other sources to place the group in its original context. Instead of plotting it out as a story and using literary devices like foreshadowing, he allows the story to unfold as it happened and presents the information in a manner like you would read it as it was happening.

The book is thoroughly researched and Hjort presents detailed information on recording session as well as discography information. The book is full of photos of the band through the years and lots of inside stories.

So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star is a must have for Byrds fans. Casual fans will walk away with a deeper knowledge of the band. Regardless of your level of fandom, the book is an enjoyable look at as great band.

[Don't forget to sign up for the Hutt Burritos giveaway! Only a couple more days, then I'll announce the winner on Monday (11/24)]

Review: Hot Burritos by John Einarson with Chris Hillman

2008-11-19T06:59:00.001-08:00

The roots of the genre now referred to as Americana are varied and deep, but one band is often cited heavily in that long list of originators – The Flying Burrito Brothers. Or more specifically, one member is cited more often, that member being Gram Parsons.

But the band never really was that successful (“We’re more popular now than we ever were in our time,” co-founder Chris Hillman says in the book), and never really had a consistent line-up. More myths about the band, and, again, specifically Gram Parsons, seem to spring up each year. This is one of the reasons Hillman felt it was time to set the record straight.

The story of the Byrds and their contributions to what became country-rock have been told many times and in several books. Gram Parsons himself has been subject of a few books. But not until now has the story of the Flying Burrito Brothers as a band been told in full.

Author John Einarson has authored twelve books, many of them associated with the California country-rock scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, including Desperados: The Roots Of Country-Rock and books on Buffalo Springfield, ex-Byrd Gene Clark, Neil Young and others. He is an acknowledged expert on country-rock and its origins and influence, but to tell the Burritos story he enlisted the help of co-founder Chris Hillman.

While many people think strictly of Parsons when they think of the Burritos, Hillman was an equal partner in the forming of the group and in fact had a much deeper pedigree when it came to country and roots music.

Born in 1944 in Los Angles, Hillman grew up listening to folk and rock ‘n’ roll until he came across records by The New Lost City Ramblers and Flatt & Scruggs. He quickly fell in love with the sound of the mandolin and began to study instrument. In 1962 he joined the regional bluegrass group The Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, based in San Diego. Around a year later the group began to break apart and Hillman was asked to join the Golden State Boys with Don Parmley on banjo and Rex and Vern Gosdin on bass and guitar, respectively.

In late 1964 Hillman was invited to try out for a new group called the Jet Set and included Jim McGuinn, David Crosby, Michael Clarke and Gene Clark. After he joined the group they changed their name to the Byrds and their popularity soared with songs “Turn! Turn! Turn!” “Eight Miles High” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the band was labeled the American answer to the Beatles.

After some member turnover, the group was stripped down to McGuinn (now called Roger, following a religious conversion) and Hillman in 1967 and they released the country-tinged The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Just after the albums’ release Hillman had a chance meeting with Gram Parsons. Months later Parsons showed up at an audition for Byrds band members and Hillman found he has met a musical kindred spirit.
The group went on to record Sweetheart of the Rodeo, an album now considered a masterpiece, but was at the time the poorest selling Byrds album to have been released. During the recording and promoting of the album, Parsons ego and selfishness began to show through in little ways. After he had sung several tracks on the album, the record label was informed that Parsons was under contract to a small label owned by Lee Hazelwood, something Parsons failed to tell the group. As a result all of his vocals had to be taken from the album and hastily replaced. At an appearance at the Grand Ole Opry, a rare opportunity for a band still considered by most to be a rock band, Parsons changed the song they were to sing after Tompall Glaser had already announced the scheduled selection. Hillman notes in the book that this was very insulting to Glaser and very poor etiquette on Parsons’ part.

But those flashes of self-involvement would pale in comparison to Parsons next stunt. After meeting and opening for the Rolling Stones, the group went to visit them in England before the Byrds were to tour South Africa. On the day they were to embark, Parsons decided he was not going, citing apartheid as the reason and claiming that he was opposed to it after growing up in the South. Hillman calls that argument “ridiculous” and claims, “He wanted to stay with the Rolling Stones.” And with that, Parsons was out of the Byrds.

Einarson and Hillman take the reader through the good times and the bad leading up to the founding of the Burritos. Like the excellent researcher that he is, Einarson doesn’t rely simply on Hillman’s voice but interviews many other people, from label staff to band members to critics, to round out the story.

The story continues as Hillman and Parsons cross paths again and slowly begin to get together to play music and write songs. It seems that all is forgiven, but maybe not completely forgotten. The duo begins to slowly assemble a band and is signed to a label. Even in this early stage, history has been tainted to tell that it was Parsons vision of melding country and rock that got them their break, but as Einarson tells us, Parson was at that time a virtual unknown and it was Hillmans name that opened the doors.

The book reminds us that Hillman had been playing country and bluegrass for years before he met Parsons, who had only discovered country music in the past few years of his life. Perhaps it was because Parsons had the zeal of a new convert that he is remembered as being such a passionate catalyst.

As the story unfolds, it is easy to see that Parsons was often times more interested in being the “rock star” than with being part of a group. After their first album, Gilded Palace of Sin, was released and didn’t meet with huge sales numbers, Parsons began to drift, losing interest in what they were doing. He began to drift away from his bandmates and further into drugs and alcohol. Hillman admits that he was no angel, (indeed the book doesn’t paint Hillman as a saint or hide any warts) only that he knew where to draw the line and was always able to maintain a level of professionalism, two things Parson couldn’t always do.

During the recording of the second Burritos album, Burrito Deluxe, Parsons sank even further, eventually missing practices and recording sessions. The story goes that Parsons outgrew the band and left them behind to spread his wings and create his “Cosmic American Music.” But Hillman tells the story of a Parsons that was so wasted that he would sing a ballad after the band had started an up-tempo number. One night it came to a head and Hillman fired his partner. And with that, Parsons was out of the Burritos.

From there Gram went on to a brief solo career and is credited with discovering Emmylou Harris, but Hillman recounts the real story of Rick Roberts and Kenny Wertz, both playing with the Burritos at that time, seeing Harris sing and bringing Hillman in to see her. Later Hillman told Parsons about her (they had made amends by then, but were not working together) because he knew Parsons was looking for a girl singer to join him.

But the story of the Burritos doesn’t end with the departure of Parsons. Hillman soldiered on and with new ensembles released two more Burritos album, The Flying Burrito Brothers in 1971 and the live set Last Of The Red Hot Burritos in1972. Hillman then joined Stephen Stills in the country-rock forerunner Manassas.

Hillman’s side of the story differs at many points with the popular myth that has become fact in many circles. Hillman says that is because certain people in those circles stand to make money off of the “Parsons as originator” story. Bernie Leadon, who played guitar in the second incarnation of the band and would go on to co-found The Eagles, puts it bluntly: “How can you compete with a dead guy? You just can’t. It’s a martyr thing.”

But Hot Burritos isn’t a book slamming Parsons or looking to diminish the contributions he might have made to the music. Hillman and Einarson, give plenty of credit where it is due. What this book sets out to do, and does wonderfully, is give a balanced account of a band that stood at the forefront of a new movement in music. A movement that still has repercussions today be it in the Americana genre and even the mainstream country genre.

Einarsons well-researched approach gives a fantastic overview of the music the band made and of the scene from which it came from and to which it eventually contributed. He was able to speak with nearly all of the principles involved with the obvious exception of Parsons. The book stands as a cornerstone in the written history of the country-rock movement and the eventual Americana genre.

Don't forget to leave a comment and to win a free copy of Hot Burritos, thanks to Jawbone Press. Go here to sign up. The winner will be announced Monday, Nov. 24. Good Luck!

Giveaway reminder

2008-11-18T06:48:00.000-08:00

Don't forget to sign up for this weeks giveaway! I have one copy of Hot Burritos by John Einarson to give away, thanks to Jawbone Press. You can sign up in the comment section below or here. Don't forget to leave a way for me to get a hold of you if you win. The winner will be announced next Monday (11/24).

Tomorrow I will be posting my review of the book.

Interview with John Einarson

2008-11-17T05:22:00.001-08:00

John Einarson is an author and music historian living in Winnipeg, Canada. Though many miles and years removed from the California Music scene, he has become an expert on the bands that thrived there through the 1960s and '70s. He has written 12 books and is widely considered an expert on the life of Neil Young and the origins of country-rock. His newest book Hot Burritos, written with Chris Hillman, examines the life of the band many call the most influential country-rock band and the originators ofAmericana as we know it today. Mr. Einarson was kind enough to take a few minutes to speak with Music Tomes.

But before we get to the interview, Jawbone Press, publishers of Hot Burritos, has provided Music Tomes with 1 copy of Hot Burritos to give away. Sign up in the comment section and don't forget to leave a way for me to get ahold of you.

Music Tomes: You have written several books that center around the California music scene including Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock, and books on Buffalo Springfield, Gene Clark (of the Byrds) and now the Flying Burrito Brothers. What is it about that scene that
draws you to it?

John Einarson: There was always something alluring and mystical to me about the Sunset Strip/Hollywood music scene of the 1960s beginning with The Byrds. If push comes to shove I would have to declare The Byrds to be my all time favourite band, bar none. They initiated my
fascination with that particular music scene – the music, the clubs, the people, the Strip. So it was only natural that I would follow all the Byrd offshoots. And when the guy who lived up the street and around the corner from me here in Winnipeg, Neil Young, arrived in LA in April 1966 and met Stills and Furay in a Sunset Strip traffic jam that sealed my obsession with that whole milieu. More than merely a hit song, "California Dreamin'" also became a clarion call to musicians from across the continent and along with their instruments they brought their own particular influences: folk, country, bluegrass, roots, R 'n' B. So you had this incredible melting pot stirring up in a handful of clubs out of which would emerge folk-rock, acid/raga rock, country-rock and more. It was an amazing time that piqued my curiosity and desire to explore it more, hence the various books I've done from that similar turf. Odd to have a Canadian from the prairies chronicling the southern California music scene. And I'm currently working on another biography of a southern California '60s artist, although not country music related by a long shot.

MT: Hot Burritos is a biography of a band rather than just an individual. Does writing about a group pose any special challenges that you haven't encountered writing about an individual like Neil Young or Gene Clark?

JE: I've done books on bands before – Steppenwolf, the Guess Who, Buffalo Springfield – so it's not a stretch for me. But when taking on a group you have to be cognisant of the fact that there will be differing perspectives and opinions on shared events and experiences. Not every member saw things the same way. And generally there were rivalries, jealousies and conflicts within a group, some of which still linger. But the process is similar in terms of how you develop the story and approach assembling the research. The real challenge for me as a writer was undertaking a biography of a character who was not available to me: Gene Clark. That posed more problems for me developing a portrait of someone I had never met or sat down to interview face-to-face. There was a lot of pressure on me to get it right, hence I undertook over 100 interviews to develop a thorough character study of the man.

MT: How did Chris Hillman become involved as a co-writer?

JE: I had interviewed Chris for three previous books so I had a good relationship with him before going into the Burritos project. He respects my integrity as a writer and has appreciated my previous books, most notable of these being the Gene Clark book. He was very moved by that book and learned more about his former band mate and friend than he ever knew before, which led to a greater understanding of why Gene did the things he did. So when I determined that I wanted to take on the Burritos story I immediately asked Chris if he would cooperate. Initially he was reluctant – he's always been somewhat guarded about the Burritos story – but then a couple of things happened related to the Burritos history that reinforced all the misinformation and myth surrounding the group's story that he has had to deal with for decades. That convinced him that it was time to set the record straight once and for all. He has had to endure the ever-exaggerated mythology surrounding the band for 40 years and it hasn't always been easy. I would not have proceeded with the book without his support and cooperation. He alone is the one who can truly tell the real story of The Flying Burrito Brothers. And no one was closer to Gram Parsons than Chris Hillman. Some people may not agree with his take on what went down but he was there and he knows the truth, hard as it may be for some to accept.

MT: Hillman has been closely associated with two talented, but ultimately tragic artists, Clark and Parsons, yet he seems to have little in common with them other than music. Why do you think they gravitated toward each other?

JE: The music. That was the draw. Chris was no monk in his younger days but he never succumbed to the vices that these two associates did. As he always admits he knew when to pull back and avoid the abyss. Chris is a very focused individual and he doesn't suffer fools lightly. For him it's always about the music and the times he worked with both Gram and Gene remain special moments for him because of the music they made together. But he couldn't and wouldn't emulate their lifestyles. Chris played on just about every album Gene Clark made long after he left The Byrds. Why? Because of the music. With Gram, Chris found a kindred spirit, someone who shared his deep love of country music. They were brothers-in-arms until Gram abandoned their friendship. The songs they created together still stand up today. That's quite a legacy.

MT: With your familiarity of the scene and having interviewed many of the artists involved with the advent of country-rock, why do you feel that Gram Parsons gets so much of the credit?

JE: He died so young and for many nowadays they regard him as having given his life for his muse. It's the whole Tennessee Williams southern gothic decadence and drug misadventure scenario and the kidnapped coffin thing all wrapped up together make it like a Hollywood B-movie. As Bernie Leadon says in the book, "It's the martyr thing. Gram fell on his sword so he's the dead hero. He's mythic. He's like Alexander or something. We only remember his virtues, not his sins." Our society loves dead heroes. And from all this has sprung the whole mythology and mystique surrounding Gram Parsons. To the uninitiated Gram single-handedly invented country rock. He was the lone voice in the wilderness championing the virtues of country music to the hippie masses. Nice story; not true.

MT: Is it even possible to pin the innovation on one particular person?

JE: No. Absolutely not. In my book Desperados: The Roots Of Country Rock I tried to show that there were many players/singers/songwriters integrating country/bluegrass/roots music with rock at the same time, most of them before Gram ever heard Buck Owens and most doing it better than him. And Hot Burritos supports that reality. Chris Hillman, Gene Clark, Rodney Dillard, Mike Nesmith, Larry Murray, Richie Furay, Jimmy Messina, Rick Nelson, Clarence White, Ian & Sylvia Tyson, Linda Ronstadt, Bernie Leadon, Jeff Hanna, Steve Young – just to name a few – were all attempting the same thing Gram would do.

MT: What do you find to be the hardest part of the writing process?

JE: Gathering the research is the most difficult part of the process. Doing preliminary research (eg. scouring every resource, record, review, article you can possibly locate), contacting interviewees, setting up interviews, travel, transcribing interviews, assembling the story in a cohesive and chronological manner – these are the most labour-intensive parts of the biography writing process. But, on the other hand, it's also the most fascinating since you are basically attempting to put together a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what all the pieces are or where they might be. You'll never get every piece so you do the best you can to develop as complete a portrait as possible.

MT: Why do you feel what you write about is important?

JE: Because I do not write for my main source of income I'm in a position whereby I can choose the subjects that fascinate me rather than the ones that will yield the most money. If I wrote exclusively for my living I'd be writing about Shania Twain, Kurt Cobain or Madonna because
those contracts are going to be far more lucrative. But I'm not interested in writing about artists I have no curiosity about or appreciation of. The subjects of my books have all been artists whose music I admire, respect, and have an interest in knowing more about, and who have a fascinating story surrounding them. Bottom line is that I'm always drawn to a strong story not merely a chronology of dates and facts. I like the human drama surrounding these artists and the story arch they have. That said, I feel what I'm doing has some importance because despite not being on the level of a Twain, Cobain, Madonna or Beatles, these artists nonetheless have had an impact on music and popular culture. If I didn't tell their stories who would? And without these stories our knowledge and appreciation of music history would be less. I don't want to sound like I'm on some noble crusade; I'm just drawn to write about artists who may be outside the mainstream but have significant stories surrounding them that should be told and remembered. Unfortunately it's getting tougher and tougher to find publishers willing to take the risk on a less-than-mainstream subject. Thank goodness for niche publishers like Jawbone who see the virtue in these kinds of important stories.

MT: Do you have any new projects that you are working on?

JE: I'm just starting on a biography of enigmatic singer/songwriter/cult figure Arthur Lee of '60s favourites Love. Arthur remains a towering presence in popular music and Forever Changes routinely ranks high on every critical list of milestone albums. I have always been a Love fan and Arthur's life fascinates me. Like all my previous subjects, the Burritos included, there is much myth, mystery and mystique surrounding Arthur. I am working with his widow Diane Lee and we're taking a very unique approach to the book. I'm very excited. I'm also in
the process of hopefully getting a book off the ground on a legendary Canadian music duo.

MT: Can you recommend some essential reading for those interested in music and musicians?

JE: I'm reluctant to pinpoint specific books because it is all relative to the particular musical interests of the reader. But I would urge anyone with an interest in music history to read as much as you can get your hands on, and that means books, not just Wikipedia and the All Music Guide. I'm a voracious reader of music history/biography books and that experience has helped me hone my own craft. There are some terrific books out there. Seek them out.

Review: Country Music Humorists and Comedians by Loyal Jones

2008-11-13T06:47:00.000-08:00

[This review also appears at Americana Roots]

At one time country music and comedy went hand and hand with many bands carrying a comedian with their band to act as a comic relief between the songs of life. As radio barn dances grew out of the vaudeville tradition many of the routines stayed with the musicians to keep the crowds entertained and interested.

Over time some of those comedians stepped out on their own to make names for them selves and became as famous, and in some cases more famous, that the artists they accompanied. Comedians like Minnie Pearl and Rod Brasfield, to name but two, became stars in their own right appearing weekly on the Grand Ole Opry through the ‘40s and ‘50s.

In the mid- to late-‘60s, country music made its way onto the small screen with a shows like The Wilburn Brothers Show featuring comedian Harold Morrison and The Porter Wagoner Show featuring Speck Rhodes. These comedians acted as special guests, as in the case of Morrison, or members of the band, as the bass playing Rhodes.

As the years wore on, fewer and fewer comedians were utilized in country music acts. In 1968 CBS aired the summer replacement series Hee-Haw, which was modeled after the popular Rowan and Martin Laugh-In and utilized both comedy and country music to reach audiences. Many of the comedic performers on the show were ones who had been involved in earlier comedy shows that had been phased out, such as Grandpa Jones, Stringbean and Sheb Wooley. Many of the routines these comedians were either straight from or adapted from early comedy routines, some of them reaching back to minstrel tent shows.

While country comedy was still alive in the 1970s and ‘80s, it was no where near as popular as it had once been until the late-‘80s/early-‘90s when Jeff Foxworthy began to gain popularity. His assembled tour, The Blue Collar Comedy Tour, where Foxworthy teamed with Bill Engvall, Ron White and Larry the Cable Guy, is one of the highest grossing touring acts going.

Loyal Jones has written several books on the topic of rural and country humor, including some joke books. He is the retired director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College and an acknowledged expert in Appalachian studies.

What Jones has put together in Country Music Humorists and Comedians is really a two part volume. The larger part of the book is made up of an encyclopedia-like reference pulling together entries on country comedians and humorists from the early days of country radio to the present day. As the title states, both comedians and humorists are covered in the book. Biographical sketches of comedians range from the early Grand Ole Opry pair of Jamup and Honey and Pete Stamper to Larry the Cable Guy and Etta May.

The addition of humorists broadens the scope from just those that stood before audiences as comedians to those that were primarily artists (like Jim Stafford or Little Jimmy Dickens) but included humor in their songs and shows to writers and actors like the late Lewis Grizzard and Andy Griffith.

The other part of the book is Jones’ less than 50 page introduction to the subject. In those 40-some pages he covers the history of comedy in country music and its importance to the development of country in growing a connection between artist and audience. This brief introduction packs in so much information and history that it alone would be worth picking up the book to have.

Jones’ writing style is easy going and he is able to easily convey the importance of the subject without ever coming across heavy-handed or too academic. His research is extremely thorough and he strives to bring the subject to life for the reader. Throughout the book he includes examples of the humor from many of the comedians so that the reader might get a better understanding of what they did as a performer.

They say that music is a hard topic to write about, but it is even harder to write about a topic as subjective as humor. Jones does a highly commendable job of giving the subject its due.

Reading and Music

2008-11-12T08:57:00.001-08:00

This might be old news for some of you, but I just recently ran across it. On the NY Times book blog, they run a feature every Wednesday called "Living With Music." In it they ask an author to submit a playlist of their favorite songs. They seem to ask a lot of novelists, but there are many others as well. While this isn't strictly about books about music, it is about books and music. It is interesting to see what many of these authors pick and to read their reasoning.

This also got me thinking about what I listen to when I read. Sometimes I will listen to the artist I am reading about. For instance, I finished a new book on the Flying Burrito Brothers last week (come back next week for a full week of fun surrounding that book including a review, interview and a little something extra). I read while I am on the treadmill a lot of times so I dialed up The Burritos on my iPod.

Location of where I am reading comes into play as well. On the treadmill, it is the iPod, which offers many choices. Sometimes I sit downstairs in the living room and if I am alone, I will dial in Sirrus radio on the dish and listen to Classic Jazz or Sirrusly Sinatra. Sometimes I sit upstairs by a big window that overlooks the small lake across the road. This is an especially good place for reading in the morning. Lately I have been listening to the same CD when I sit there, Cannonnball Adderley's Somethin' Else.

How about you? What do you listen to? Anything? Or do you prefer quiet?

Interview with Robert K. Oermann

2008-11-11T05:11:00.001-08:00

Robert K. Oermann is one of those critics and music journalists that a non-obsessive fan would be able to recognize. They may not know his name right off the bat, but as soon as they see him, they know who he is. That's because in addition to being a writer, Oermann appeared as a judge on the first season of Nashville Star and has appeared on several music related documentaries and just about anything CMT produces with a list.

But today, we talk to him about his writing. Oermann has previously published four books, including the fantastic Finding Her Voice, which remains the go to source for information on women in country music. He recently released his fifth book, Behind The Grand Ole Opry Curtain and was kind enough to answer a few questions for Music Tomes.

Music Tomes: Where did you grow up and how did you get interested in country music?

Robert K. Oermann: I grew up in Pittsburgh and listened to The Wheeling Jamboree as a kid. My grandmother owned a music store, record shop and jukebox chain in DuBois, PA. It's in the Appalachian Mountain part of western Pennsylvania, an area called "Pennsyltucky." My four uncles drove to the taverns and diners to stock the jukeboxes with records. In the summers, I liked to clerk in the store and my grandmother paid me in used 45s off the jukeboxes. As a teen, I was a big soul-music fan. But in college I started reading about Hank Williams, Red Foley and Kitty Wells. I realized I had records by them that I had never listened to. When I did, I became a huge country fan and decided to make it my mission in life to convert others.

MT: How did you get interested in music journalism?

RKO: I came to Nashville to be a librarian at the Country Music Hall of Fame's archive. Most of the people who used the archive were writing books, screenplays or magazine articles. I read what they wrote and thought, "I could do that." Even though my degrees are in fine arts and library science. So I started writing for local, then national country-music magazines. Writers in Nashville who were already covering the stars were extremely generous and helpful to me when I started. I think it was because I had been so knowledgeable and helpful to them whenever they were doing research for their stories.

MT: Is there a particular interview (or interviews) that stand out as the most memorable in your mind?

RKO: Dolly Parton is always a complete delight to interview, so she is a favorite. Plus, I am a huge fan of hers. Likewise, Vince Gill and Bill Anderson. Hal Ketchum, Barbara Mandrell, Marty Stuart and Pam Tillis are longtime friends of mine, so it is always a pleasure to spend time with them. Dierks Bentley is a close neighbor, so we see each other walking our dogs and such. But I have been doing this for so many years, that visiting with everybody in the book was like catching up with old buddies.

MT: What is the most difficult part of the writing process for you?

RKO: Actually, I don't find writing difficult at all. Before I type anything, I spend several days outlining what I plan to say and how I plan to say it. So by the time I sit down to write, out it comes. With this book, the difficulty was meeting the deadline. I didn't. But even though I was several months behind schedule, everything turned out fine.

MT: You released an update of your excellent book "Finding Her Voice" in 2000. In a little over a year it will be ten years since that release. Will there possibly be another update to cover the the rise of women in country post-Shania?

RKO: Mary [Bufwack, Oermann's co-author and wife] and I still love Finding Her Voice. It is special to us because we wrote it together and because it has remained in print for these many years. But as of now, we don't have any plans to update it.

MT: Your newest book tells the stories of many of the members of the Opry. Was it your goal to present stories that would present these artists as people rather than stars? Why?

RKO: The concept for Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain was developed by the Opry, itself. The executives came to me with their idea and I agreed that it was a good one. And, yes, the idea was to write personal stories of triumphs and tragedies to bring them to life as people rather than stars.

MT: One of the great things about your book is that you cover stars whose stories haven't been told nearly enough, like Dottie West, Johnny Paycheck, Bill Anderson and Faron Young. How did you strike a balance between stars people would immediately recognize, such as Trace Adkins and Dierks Bentley, and the more obscure stars?

RKO: I love classic country music, so I wanted that kind of star in the book as well as the newcomers. Also: The stories of some of the classic stars are so dramatic that I knew they would make for compelling reading. So I not only wanted folks to get to know and appreciate them, but also to have their eyes opened about the lives they led.

MT: Why do you feel what you write about is important?

RKO: I believe that people need music and art in their lives just as much as they need food, shelter and other "essentials." I believe that people love to cry as much as they love to laugh, and that both are good for us. I think that if you love music passionately, you also like to read about it. At least I do. And I believe that sometimes reading about music can give you a break from reading depressing news stories.

MT: Do you have any projects in the works that you can talk about?

RKO: Right now, I am being featured on PBS stations nationally, hosting specials about Patsy Cline and Marty Robbins. I hope to do more of those next year and possibly develop another book proposal.

MT: What are some books you might recommend as essential reading?

RKO: MY books, of course! In addition to Finding Her Voice and Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain, my Little Miss Dynamite autobiography with Brenda Lee is still in print. But I am also fond of Craig Havighurst's Air Castle of the South, Bill Malone's Country Music USA, Charles Wolfe's A Good-Natured Riot and Holly George-Warren's Gene Autry biography Public Cowboy No. 1. Also. my book is one of three the Opry has recently commissioned. The other two are Around the Grand Ole Opry Table by Kay West and The Grand Ole Opry by Colin Escott.

Amazon.com Widgets

Giveaway Winners!

2008-11-10T06:42:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to the winners of the Douglas B. Green's new book Classic Country Singers. Thanks to all those that entered and keep checking back as I will be having more giveaways in the future.

So, I wrote all of the names down, cut them out and had my lovely wife pull five names last night. And the winners are:

Brady
CMW
Karin
J.R. Journey
Terry

A BIG thanks to Gibbs-Smith Publishing for providing the prizes for this giveaway!

Interview with Douglas B. Green

2008-11-07T06:13:00.000-08:00

We wrap up this week long celebration of Classic Country Singers with a conversation with the book's author, Douglas B. Green. This is the third book from Green, also known as Ranger Doug in the Riders in the Sky. If you haven't yet, take a look at yesterday post and sign up to win a copy of Classic Country Singers.

Music Tomes: When did you first become interested in country music history?

Douglas B. Green: Hard to say; I always loved history, and when I got into folk music, etc. in high school it just seemed natural to want to find out the history of the song and the performer; later, when I got into other types of music, it was the same thing: who played that solo, where was it recorded, who was the singer... that kind of stuff always interested me. The couple of years I worked at the Country Music Foundation Libaray in the early '70s was heaven... I had access to all the answers and the music!

MT: The new book is beautifully illustrated with artist photos and copies of rare songbooks and sheet music. I understand those come from your personal collection. How do you search for such items? When did you begin?

DBG: I've been collecting sheet music, movie posters, movie stills, and publicity pictures since the 1970s; I still check out the music/film sections of antique malls from time to time, and of course there are a lot of online sources and eBay if I need something specific.

MT: You profile 46 artists in the book, some of which are rarely written about any more (from Ted Daffen and The Hoosier Hot shots to Jimmy Wakely and Faron Young). How did you decide which artists to include?

DBG: It was a purely personal set of choices; I wanted to include people like Daffan who were influential, but currently overlooked, and people like the Blue Sky Boys who did not have hits but were influential as well. Of course we had to include Hank and the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills and Bill Monroe, etc. There are some others I might have, and possibly should have, chosen (the Bailes Brothers, Gid Tanner, Ferlin Husky), but I am comfortable with my choices. Elton Britt and Jimmy Wakely were huge in their way, as was Carson Robison...can you believe they aren't in the Hall of Fame yet?

MT: You have played in two genres (bluegrass with Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys and western with Riders in the Sky) that are rich in history and have a healthy respect for those that came before you. Looking at the current country music field, do you think that sense of history is being lost?

DBG: I've also played dixieland, traditional jazz, and western swing (with the Time Jumpers) as well! I think every generation thinks the next generation has forgotten the past, but really there are a number of young people out there who are putting their own twist on traditional music, and I think with a resource like the Country Music Foundation (and the Autry Museum and the Cowboy Hall of Fame and the John Edwards Memorial Foundation) the next generation has tremendous access to information about the past, and as iTunes and other such services make more and more historical music available over the internet, this stuff is out there for all to listen to. There will always be those of us who love the music of the past and want to learn about it... not many, maybe, but enough to keep these traditional styles alive.

MT: Why do you feel that what you write about is important?

DBG: Because there are people who still remember and want to hold those memories, and people who may be interested to learn where this all comes from. The fine folks at Gibbs Smith and I have provided that in a compact, visually interesting and I hope informative way.

MT: Do you feel like part of what you do in Riders in the Sky is to further educate or remind people about the Western roots of music? Do you see younger fans who have responded to your role in Toy Story 2?

DBG: Definitely! My greatest joy (well, the two Grammys were great, too) is seeing kids get interested in cowboys, the west, and western music. They may outgrow it after a while, but there will be a few, like me, who remember the great western songs from childhood and want to preserve them.

MT: Can you tell us a little about some of the projects you have going right now?

DBG: I have no current writing projects except a set of liner notes on Gene Autry. I scarcely have time if I did, as the Riders will do 210 dates this year, our busiest year of our career, and I am stretched thin traveling and recording. With the Riders we are not only doing road dates, but just completed writing songs for a new Disney attraction, writing songs and recording the soundtrack for the series of Jasper specials on the RFD channel, and doing commercials and online skits for a regional product called YellowWood. We have two albums we have not been able to finish, and I still play with the Time Jumpers every Monday I'm home... all that and do the regular stuff guys do: spend time with my kids (one still at home and the 4 grown ones), mow the lawn, work on the house, pay the bills, etc., etc., etc.

MT: What books would you recommend as essential reading?

DBG: I read all the time on the road and can recommend current events ("The World Without Us"), classic fiction ("Go Down Moses"), detective fiction ("The Chill"). Essential music reading: many of the books in the bibliography of Classic Country Singers would be essential, especially Bill Malone's Country Music, USA.

Classic Country Singers Giveaway

2008-11-06T05:14:00.000-08:00

When I received a copy of Douglas B. Green's Classic Country Singers I didn't really intend to devote a week celebrating it - but I have! Monday I featured an interview with the book's designer Kurt Walhner, yesterday I posted my review and tomorrow I will be posting an interview with "Ranger Doug." I didn't intend on spending a week on it, but it deserves the attention. There are a lot of small-press or niche press books out there that deserve more attention than they receive, which is one of the reasons I started this blog. Classic Country Singers is a book that would be an excellent gift for someone interested in country music or look beautiful out on your coffee table.

So, thanks to the generosity of Gibbs Smith, publisher of Classic Country Singers, Music Tomes has 5 copies of the book to give away! All you have to do is leave a message in the comments and 5 winners will be randomly drawn from those commenters. The winners of the books will be posted here on Monday (11/10). Make sure you leave a way for me to contact you.

Good Luck!

Review: Classic Country Singers by Douglas B. Green

2008-11-05T06:26:00.000-08:00

[This review also appears at Americana Roots]

Most authors immerse themselves in their subject either by delving into their music or films, by reading other books on them or by talking to people their subject knew. Douglas B. Green has done all of that, but he has also immersed himself into the music business as a performer. Better know professionally as “Ranger Doug,” Green serves as lead singer and guitarist for the Western music outfit Riders in the Sky.

Classic Country Singers is Green’s third book and he has taken the opportunity to profile 46 country artists. Among them are artists that have faded in the collective memory of general country music fans of today. Artists such as the influential Blue Sky Boys (Bill and Earl Bolick), Ted Daffan, Riley Puckett and Hank Snow are covered here among many others including popular, and well-known, artists like Minnie Pearl, Bill Monroe (whom Green played with in the 1970s as a Blue Grass Boy), Kitty Wells and, of course, Hank Williams.

For studious fans of country music history, Classic Country Singers doesn’t break any new ground; there are no bold revelations or tell-all tales included. Green draws from many sources to give a sketch of each artist’s life and career. His warm and personal writing style sets the book apart from other books on the subject that are written more in a textbook style.

Another thing that sets this book apart is the gorgeous design (see my interview with designer Kurt Wahlner earlier in the week). The design uses bright colors that draw you into the readings. Using old photographs, song books and sheet music as illustrations and design elements, the book shares a consistent look with much of the subjects of the book.

One of my favorite country music history books of the last few years is Will The Circle Be Unbroken (edited by Paul Kingsbury and Alanna Nash and published by DK Publishing and the Country Music Hall Of Fame). That book gave a wonderful overview of country music history from its beginnings to more current days. Classic Country Singers serves as an excellent, while unintended, companion to Will The Circle Be Unbroken. Where Will The Circle... touches briefly on influential artists in the genre, Classic Country Singers gives them a deeper profile.

For newer country fans that might be interested in digging a little deeper in the history of this music Classic Country Singers would provide an excellent starting point.

[Be sure to come back tomorrow for a special announcement concerning Classic Country Singers.]

New Releases

2008-11-04T10:58:00.000-08:00

Here are some new releases from Nov. 1 through the end of the year. I will try to update this list periodically.

Nov. 1:
Country Music: The Masters by Marty Stuart (Sourcebooks MediaFusion)
Hot Burritos: The True Story of The Flying Burrito Brothers by John Einarson with Chris Hillman (Jawbone Press)
Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music by Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching (University of Michigan Press)
Southern Fiddlers and Fiddle Contests by Chris Goertzen (University Press of Mississippi)
Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis by Paul Maher Jr. and Michael K. Dorr (Editors) (Lawrence Hill Books)

Nov. 4:
Born Country: How Faith, Family, and Music Brought Me Home by Randy Owen (HarperOne)

Nov. 11:
Sinatra in Hollywood by Tom Santopietro (Thomas Dunne Books)
The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music by Ben Ratliff (Times Books)
The Hit Charade: Lou Pearlman, Boy Bands, and the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in U.S. History by Tyler Gray (Collins)
The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey & Passions: Photos, Letters, Memories & More from Q’s Personal Collection by Quincy Jones (Insight Editions)

Nov. 17:
Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods by Annie J. Randall (Oxford University Press)

Nov. 19:
Country Music Humorists and Comedians by Loyal Jones (University of Illinois Press)

Nov. 28:
A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States: Feasts of Musical Celebration by Ronald D. Cohen (The Scarecrow Press)

Nov. 30:
Mods, Rockers, and the Music of the British Invasion by James E. Perone (Praeger Publishers)

Dec. 1:
Pure Country: The Leon Kagarise Archives, 1961-1971 by Eddie Dean (Daniel 13/Process)
The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop - and Why It Matters by Tricia Rose (Basic Civitas Books)

Dec. 16:
The Foundations of Rock: From "Blue Suede Shoes" to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" by Walter Everett (Oxford University Press)

Dec. 25:
Waiting for a Train: Jimmie Rodgers's America by Mary E. Davis (Rounder Books)

Dec. 30:
Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia by Robert Greenfield (Plexus Publishing)

Interview with Kurt Wahlner

2008-11-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

Last week I received the new book from Douglas B. Green, Classic Country Singers. It is a small book featuring profiles of several country music artists from the late 1920s to the mid-fifties. One thing that jumped out at me was the beautiful design of the the book and the vibrant layouts that graced the pages. (I'll have a review of the book, as well as an interview with the author, later this week). Since designers rarely get the credit they deserve, I decided we should hear a little more from the designer of the book, Kurt Wahlner.

Music Tomes: Are you a fan of country music?

Kurt Wahlner: Not really. I have the luxury of listening to whatever I like while working, so I like to listen to Classical and Opera - perhaps because a 3-hour long opera seems to last longer than a 45-minute pop album. When I was working as Art Director at Gibbs Smith in Utah, one of the editors there, Madge Baird, was in charge of editing Doug Green's first book for them called Singing Cowboys. She took me to see Rider's in the Sky when they were appearing at a Cowboy Poetry Event. I like to immerse myself in the subjects of the books that I work on, so I went with a anthropologist's eye, taking in all the saddle and boot makers at the craft faire.

But what really caught my attention was the music played by Riders in the Sky - not "Country and Western," but "Western" or "Cowboy" music. "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds," "Back in the Saddle Again" and "Cool Water" - songs that reference the western viewpoint without reverting to the "She done me wrong" kind of thing. I am a sucker for pop music from between the World Wars of all nations - there is something about the musicianship and the tonalities that connect with the best tone-poems of the Classical Repertory. There is a song that Doug and the Riders do that is in Spanish that I just adore called "La Maleguena." It is so moving, but it is actually two different songs that Doug arranged into one, so I guess I am impressed that the musicians of today are trying to keep it alive and fresh. I have seen a number of Cowboy Music Figures perform - I am always impressed with their shows. So I am a fan of the Cowboy Songs, yeah.

MT: When you approach a project like this, one that has over 50 years of design history and memorabilia, how do you balance the nostalgia with a current design aesthetic?

KW: Well, the current design aesthetic is pretty fractured just now. So there is a great deal of latitude there. But the basic question always seems to boil down to: Do you design a book like Classic Country Singers as a book for the people who already know this material and design it for them, or do you do the book for the people who don't know anything about it, but what to know, and design a nice, simple, "Hey, this subject's easy!" sort of vibe.

Usually, you let the words of the author be your guide. The tone of the writing is where you find your answer. When you talk to an author, very often they will say they want to bring the new people into their subject - whatever it is. But their private predilections usually direct toward, "No man, the FANS gotta DIG IT." So you can see the choice that has to be made. We have all opened up books about something that sounds interesting, and the boring presentation of the material just makes your eyes cloud over - I try to avoid that without resorting to graphic clichés.

MT: You used a lot of old songbooks and sheet music from the various artists included. Where did you get those? How did those designs and color choices affect your design decisions?

KW: All the photos and songbook covers were provided by the author, Doug "Ranger Doug" Green. He has been collecting this type of material for years. I collect things, too, so I understand. Much of the time the only picture one could find of someone like Spade Cooley would be a lobby card from a film he was in or a sheet music cover. R. Crumb would know what I'm talking about. There is a certain poignancy to these shards of history that I really enjoy working with. The trick with the presentation is to choose colors and elements that support all of it and don't fight with any of it. Less is more in these cases. I can go heavier if need be, but it doesn't usually work out that way.

MT: How did you get started in book design?

KW: Ah - how did it all start. Like most things, I didn't mean to! I started out as the fellow who pasted up the newspaper Daily Variety, then I got to co-found a monthly computer magazine called SOFTALK (not done on a computer - that came later), then to books. I knew a man who was trying to publish the first picture history of Playboy magazine, but all the sample layouts that even Hef's guys in Chicago were doing were all getting shot down - Hef wouldn't approve of any of them. I said to myself, "That's because they don't LOOK like the magazine." So I did some layouts in three-column format with Baskerville with all the headlines in lower-case italic, and guess what? Hef approved them, and I was the designer of The Playboy Book: 40 Years as well as a whole lot more. I have a list of every book that I have worked on at: http://www.kurtwahlner.com/

Interview with Loyal Jones

2008-10-30T05:43:00.000-07:00

Retired Director of the Berea College Appalachian Center Loyal Jones has written books on humor, including compilations of jokes passed through oral tradition, two biographies (Bradley Kincaid, Bascom Lamar Lunsford) and on the religious beliefs and practices of the Appalachian culture. His newest book, Country Music Humorists and Comedians (University of Illinios Press), is his ninth book and focuses on those associated with the comedy of country music from the early days of radio to today. Mr. Jones talked to Music Tomes about the book and his interest in humor.

Music Tomes: The book covers a lot of well-known comedians, but it also covers some artist not immediately thought of when one thinks of comedy, such as Clarence Ashley and Chet Atkins. What kind of process did you go through to decide which comedians should be included and which excluded?

Loyal Jones: I was interested in people who got their start in such venues as medicine, minstrel, or vaudeville shows playing comedy, even though they went on to be best-know for their singing or musicianship. Clarence Ashley, like Roy Acuff, worked for Doc Hauer's Medicine Show, and he had a comic demeanor. Chet Atkins was a witty person on stage and in private told great jokes and stories. I have knowledgeable friends in the field, such as Bill C. Malone, Ivan Tribe, Wayne Daniel, and the late Charles Wolfe, whom I consulted for names to include, and they were a great help. By having both "humorists" and "comedians" in the title certainly allowed me to cover a wider field. With some I was very subjective; I thought they were funny.

MT: Speaking of Clarence Ashley, he is probably generally best known from his appearances during the folk revival. In the fantastic introduction to the book you touch on the fact that many of the folk and bluegrass groups phased out their comedy during these appearances. You also mentioned that in an interview you had with Ralph Stanley, he shied away from the topic of comedy in his act. Do you feel like some of these acts were made to feel embarrassed of their comedy by the largely urban intellectual audiences they were playing to at those venues?

LJ: A lot of this humor originally was a country humor - as in the city slicker vs. the rube - that allowed the rube to triumph over those who thought they were better than he was, and it made the country person feel better about himself. With the folk revival, you had urban college-educated people and other people of achievement and more sophistication going to folk and bluegrass and country music venues, and they really liked the music, but they didn't take to the comedy which was sometimes corny or worse. It wasn't their kind of humor, and they might interrupt it with a shout for "more music." I think some entertainers could plainly see that their humor wasn't appreciated, and they dropped it and just played music. The Stanley Brothers certainly had a lot of comedy, and both brothers participated in it. I think that with Ralph Stanley's success in recent years, and with his age, he is concerned with his legacy, and he would rather be remembered as a great singer, instrumentalist, and stylist than as a comedian. However, fairly recently I've heard him do the "How Far to Little Rock?" skit with his son and grandson. Among the people I interviewed who used to do humor in these shows, there was a great affection for the old days when they'd have a lot of humor in their shows, and many expressed regret that the humor is not appreciated as much today.

MT: During a time when there was great political and social upheaval, "Hee-Haw" appeared on the scene. It was given bad reviews by many in the press on either coast, but caught on with viewers and ran for 24 years. During that time of change, why do you think many middle Americans took to the show?

LJ: I think that many were harking backward to a simpler time when people had fun together and didn't take themselves too seriously. Everybody knew it was a make-believe world, but once a week, they willingly and joyfully entered that world and refreshed themselves, just like beleaguered people in the Great Depression rejuvenated themselves in the old country music and comedy shows. Most people are too serious-minded or sophisticated to dress up in funny clothing and act silly, but they enjoy watching others do it. Also television brought such nonsense right into the living room and friends would never know what you were watching. Additionally, there was some really good comedic and musical talent on the show as guests and regulars. Then too, the show was a country-oriented version of the show "Laugh-In," which may have been over the heads of a lot of people. Finally, there is a strong anti-intellectual streak in the American grain that rejects too much sophistication and embraces stereotypical views to simplify the complications of life.

MT: There were also those that felt shows like "Hee-Haw," "The Beverly Hillibillies," and "Green Acres" showed rural people in an unflattering light. Now it seems, with comedians like Larry the Cable Guy, that it is more acceptable to "laugh at ourselves." Do you believe that is the case or are we just farther from our roots and perhaps not able to see we are doing so?

LJ: These shows did present country people in unflattering ways, but they were in the tradition of that old dramatic and stage humor about the rube and the city slicker which allowed the under-dog to become the top-dog. The "Toby" shows of long ago and the "Beverly Hillbillies" are quite similar in that both Toby and Jed Clampett were simple but good-humored and honest men, who resisted or sailed above the wiles of city slickers such as Banker Drysdale.

MT: You have written several books on humor, how did you become interested in this topic?

LJ: Well, I grew up among people who told stories and a lot of jokes, and early-on I started a notebook where I wrote down the punch lines of jokes. I also listened to the "Grand Ole Opry" and other stations and heard a lot of the humor associated with country music from such people as Minnie Pearl, Rod Brasfield and "The Duke of Paducah." A college friend, playwright and song writer Billy Edd Wheeler ("I'm Going to Jackson" and "Coming of the Roads"), who also does a lot of humor, and I got together and decided we ought to do a book of Appalachian humor. We already knew a lot, but we decided to stage a humor festival with real humorists and scholars of humor. We did and put together "Laughter in Appalachia," with a lot of stuff we'd stolen at the festival, and that book did so well, we did three other festivals and three more books together. This experience led me to study and think about humor and its purpose and value in our lives. And out of this came "Country Music Humorists and Comedians." Larry the Cable Guy raises other issues, such as what are appropriate subjects to use in public. The old comedians had to be careful because the shows played to family groups. There was some bathroom humor and a little sexual innuendo, but they were pretty clean. Mores have changed a lot and any subject or words are likely to be heard in comedy clubs. I would make this point. the old country humor had a lot of positive elements for the country person. "Redneck" and "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" humor is mostly negative, and the jokes have few positive qualities for the butt of jokes.

MT: Two books that you have written focus on the religion and values of Appalachian people. Do you feel that those values were often brought out in the humor of comedians of the early years of country music? How has that changed over time?

LJ: When cultures come into conflict, it is the differing values people hold that brings a tension, and out of this tension, there are a lot of jokes. One needs to think of jokes as a way to define ourselves and our group and to define those other groups who are different from us. Thus jokes are a form of communication. Church denominations tells jokes on other denominations, for example, and such jokes are relatively gentle and good-humored but portray assumed differences between two sets of beliefs. The values that have changed the most, I think are modesty and humility, which were strong in most church groups in early America, and the sin of pride was the opposite. Now, in order to succeed, persons have to "sell" themselves, especially if you are a politician. The second value that has changed is that of Personal-relatedness. In a rural society we tend to know most everybody in the community and a lot about them personally. In an urban society and in this electronic world of computers and other mean of communication, I think the old personalism is fading, and it was great part of country humor. The last value that has changed is probably that sense of place that is so much a part of country music and comedy. Most of us move a lot in pursuit of our destinies these days and we may not have the same nostalgic longing for the old home place.

MT: If you had to narrow it down, who do you think is the most influential country humorist or comedian?

LJ: I'd say Minnie Pearl and further back Rod Brasfield, and more recently Jerry Clower. Mike Snider is about the only one doing some comedy at the Opry now, and he's good.

MT: Why do you feel that the subjects you write about are important?

LJ: In terms of humor, I think that it is a valuable human trait and is indispensible in coping with the vagaries of life. I don't think we generally value it or even think about it, but it is one quality that definitely sets us humans apart from other beings. I think it affects our basic outlook, and is connected, as Norman Cousins has said, with the positive values of hope, optimism, good will, etc. I've written about many things regarding Appalachia, such as religion and values, music, humor, problems, tradition, partly to find out what I think about them, but also to help others to find meaning and some pride in their native place.

MT: Are you currently working on any new projects?

LJ: I have some material I didn't use in the county music humor book about a lot of other people who used country humor or assumed or accentuated their country persona to say important things. The best example of the latter is Will Rogers. I may do a book on that. I'm also thinking of some sort of memoir, although I suspect the world has enough of those.

MT: Can you recommend a few books you consider essential reading?

LJ: I think first of Bill C. Malone's Country Music USA and Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class. And also Douglas B. Green's Country Roots: The Origins of Country Music.

Amazon.com Widgets

Review: The Sunny Side of Appalachia: Bluegrass From the Grassroots – B.L. Dotson-Lewis

2008-10-28T10:13:00.001-07:00

[This review also appears on Americana Roots]

Bluegrass is a music steeped in tradition. Bluegrass musicians routinely honor their forefathers by continuing to feature their songs and retelling their origins and stories. Along with the sense of history there is a sense of community in bluegrass that supports a healthy festival circuit. Fans of bluegrass music travel to their favorite festival, and sometimes several festivals, annually to support the music and their favorite artists.

One such festival is “Music in the Mountains,” an annual festival held in Summersville, West Virginia. Edgar and Eunice Kitchen started the festival in 1981 on some vacant farmland near their home. The Kitchens ran the festival for 26 years and then sold the festival and property to a Nazarene organization that owned adjacent property. The festival started small but has now grown to one of the largest festivals in the country with nearly all of the large names in bluegrass playing the stage at one point in its history.

In 2007, author B.L. Dotson-Lewis visited the festival with the purpose of compiling a series of interviews that would serve as an oral history of the festival. The Sunny Side of Appalachia is the book that came from those interviews and contains the recollections of several involved in the festival, from performers to volunteers to fans.

The Sunny Side of Appalachia is the third book by Dotson-Lewis that examines a part of the Appalachian culture and seeks to both preserve is for future generations of Appalachian descendents and serve as a look at the culture for those outside.

Dotson-Lewis speaks to a couple of fans and volunteers on what bluegrass and the festival means to them. Performers she spoke to include musicians in regional acts like Jason Bragg (of Laurel Creek) and Danny Stanley (of Carolina Sonshine) and musicians in nation touring, but not as well known bands such as Anita Fisher (of The Anita Fisher Band) , Larry Gillis (of Larry Gillis Band) and Ben Greene (of Carolina Road Band). She also spoke with Jaime Dailey as he was preparing to transition from his lead vocal spot in Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver to Dailey & Vincent.

The line of questioning in each of these impromptu interviews follows the same pattern, inquiring how the artist came to bluegrass, what part it plays in their life and how they view the music today. Each interview is presented, as most oral histories are, in a question-and-answer format with minimal editing to preserve the speech patterns and dialects of the interviewee.

The jewels in this book’s crown are the interviews with the legends of the genre. Dotson-Lewis was able to speak at length with Bobby Osborne, Melvin Goins, Everett Lilly and Jesse McReynolds about the beginnings of their long and fruitful careers. Each artist is receptive and gives an entertaining interview.

The Sunny Side of Appalachia is an entertaining read for fans of the specific artists interviewed and bluegrass in general. The stories of these artists, from the legends to the seldom heard about regional groups, bring a context to the music and allow fans to get a deeper look into what brought these artist to the music and what these artists bring to the music.

Interview with B. L. Dotson-Lewis

2008-10-24T07:18:00.000-07:00

I recently ran across an article talking about a new book on bluegrass by an author I was unfamiliar with. I did a little digging and contacted B.L. Dotson-Lewis about her new book The Sunny Side Of Appalachia: Bluegrass From The Grassroots. This is Dotson-Lewis' third book in a series of books on the life in and history of Appalachia. She was gracious enough to send me a copy of the book, which I will be posting a review of next week. She was also gracious enough to give me an interview and talk a little about her passion for the Appalachian people. (You can learn more at her Web site: http://www.appalachiacoal.com/)

Music Tomes: What prompted you to want to tell the stories of Appalachia?

B.L. Dotson-Lewis: Well, Appalachia is my home and I love my home region. That is one reason.

Secondly, when I attended Berea College I was cultured in Appalachian culture. I was taught about the special gifts of the mountain people
and that they are a special group. I was taught to be proud of the mountain heritage I own. I suppose I took that all in.

As you know, Appalachia is one of the last subcultures left in the United States. When you think about a subculture, you think about a distinct group of people with similar beliefs and habits. The mountain people of Appalachia have retained and nurtured the traditions brought over from Scotland, Ireland, England and other countries when they first settled the mountains. These stories tell us about our roots, who we are, who we were, and how we got here.

I think the most authenic history we can get is through first person stories. That is what I like to do is oral histories - impromptu interviews, etc.

Down the road you may read about a coalminer or a mine disaster but actually to read the life story or details of an explosion in first person, to me is living history.

MT: Why do you feel those stories are important?

BLDL: I believe it is of vital importance these traditions be preserved now because technology and highways may eventually erase the divide which exists between Appalachians and people outside the region. When this happens and we all merge, the individuality of the region will be lost.

MT: When did you first realize you had a talent for writing?

BLDL: I have never thought of myself as talented. I love to write but it is because I am telling the stories of a group of people who are forgotten or overlooked. It is exciting and I consider it a privilege to be able to do this.

I don't have a business plan or anything like that. There is nothing written down that I am going to write 5 books or 6 books. I don't
know. It is almost as if something drops down from the sky and tells me to capture this story or take that photo. So, I am completely mesmerized by these projects.

I am doing my best to get a composite of the people who make up Appalachia.

What I do is go out and talk to people about their lives - their hardships and successes. My main emphasis has been the coalfields where I live or near my home and I don't have to look any further for the most exciting stories or sometimes the worst tragedies. The coalfields have a history of violence. It is still there.

My books are centered around the working class. I am able to give them a voice by letting them tell you their story. I can't think of anything more exciting.

MT: What is the hardest part of the writing process for you?

BLDL: I think the hardest part of actually writing for me is when I start on a project, for example the book I just finished dealing with bluegrass music, an important part of our heritage, I have trouble thinking about anything else. I can't sleep and I often dream about what I am writing about. I might wake up in the middle of the night with an idea I was not able to come up with during my waking hours. The hardest part may be for the people I am around because I will talk their ear off.

One of my major concerns is that I represent the people I have interviewed or written about in the best and most honest way possible.

I really like to keep everything very simple. My life is very simple and my writing is very simple. I don't worry about trying to come up
with big words or complex themes.

When I finished my first book, titled: Appalachia Spirit Triumphant (a cultural odyssey of Appalachia), my biggest fear was turning my material over to editors or a publisher who would wipe out all the originality so important to me. The way it has worked with my publisher, I
can keep all the original dialect, verbatim, black and white photos, large print. And my books are printed on recycled paper. All those
things are important to me. They represent Appalachia and the people whose stories are in my books. So, I couldn't not be more pleased with the outcome. I think down the road when more people see and read the books I have written they will understand what I am talking about, not because I have written the book, but because it all goes together to make the book complete. The books represent the region in format inside and outside - something to treasure.

I would like to talk about my book on bluegrass music. I love this book. The stories are great. I was able to interview bluegrass greats like Bobby Osborne, Jesse McReynolds, Everett Lilly, Aubrey Holt and relatively new musicians like Jamie Dailey. They were all impromptu interviews. It is so exciting to think about reading in first person their life stories and how their lives revolve around bluegrass music.

The music associated with Appalachia plays a key role in the history of the region. These songs and tunes tell stories about lifestyles and major historical events such as mine wars, love gone bad and happy events such as flat footin' fiddle tunes. The fact that acoustic instruments are standard for bluegrass music is one thing which sets this music apart. All these different elements make up Appalachia.

This is what I am trying to capture - the look and feel of the region and the spirit of the people. I hope I have been able to do that through my writing.

Book News

2008-10-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

There have been a couple of changes to last weeks new release list. Complete Guide To The Music Of Johnny Cash by Peter Hogan (Omnibus Press) has been canceled for the time being and will be released in a different format in the future. Outlaw: The Kris Kristofferson Story by Stephen Miller (Omnibus Press), scheduled to be released Nov. 1, has been pushed back to January.

Also, although it wasn't on the list earlier, Jawbone Press had a Bluegrass book on their one-sheet that has been.

If you are in Nashville this tomorrow, John Roger Simon, the author of Cowboy Copas And The Golden Age Of Country Music will be discussing his book at a signing at the Country Music Hall of Fame. It starts at 1:00 and if anyone gets the chance to go, feel free to send me an e-mail on how it was.

Review: Cowboy Copas and the Golden Age of Country Music by John Roger Simon

2008-10-22T10:35:00.000-07:00

[This review also appears at Americana Roots]

The name Lloyd Copas is virtually unknown to many country music fans today. The name Cowboy Copas doesn’t generally register much higher on the recognition chart. In fact, many people only recognize the name as a footnote of trivia in a story that’s been told over and over – the death of Patsy Cline.

On March 5, 1963, the plane carrying Cline crashed in the mountains of Tennessee. Not to trivialize that loss, but Cline wasn’t the only passenger. Also on that flight was Grand Ole Opry member Hawkshaw Hawkins. The pilot of the flight was Cline’s manager, Randy Hughes. Hughes was also the son-in-law of the fourth passenger, Cowboy Copas.

Born in southern Ohio in 1913, Lloyd Copas grew up playing music with friends and family. He decided to try his luck at being a full-time musicians and he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio accompanied by his friend Lester Vernon Storer, who adopted the character Natchee the Indian. The pair became a popular regional act both at live venues and on local radio stations.

But Copas wanted more and soon struck out on his own. He fronted his own band and recorded for King Records charting with “Filipino Baby” and “Tragic Romance.” Soon he came to the attention of Grand Ole Opry star Pee Wee King who asked him to consider joining his band. Copas signed on and became a regular on the Opry playing with Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys.

Copas still recorded his own songs for King Records and left Pee Wee King after a few years to again strike out on his own. His records were selling well and he became a member of the Opry. His career was doing so well that Billboard magazine featured him on the cover with King Records owner Syd Nathan and Opry manager Harry Stone as they both offered him ten-year contracts.

As the years wore on Copas’ music began to fall out of favor with radio audiences as the new Nashville Sound began to take over the airwaves. His records weren’t selling as well and he took many low paying solo gigs just to pay the bills. It was then that Don Pierce, owner of Starday Records, entered the picture.

Starday was the “Real Country Alternative” label of the day, sticking with the steel guitars and fiddles that many Nashville Sound artists put aside. Copas was used to recording for a small label with King and felt it would be a good fit.

While at Starday, Copas recorded one of his most well known songs, “Alabam,” a song his father Eldon used to play for him as a boy. The song went to #1 on July 4, 1960 revitalizing Copas’ career and putting him back in the spotlight. Record sales dramatically increased and he became a sought after, and better paid, live act.

On the day of the plane crash in 1963, Copas, at age 50, was experiencing a career resurgence. He was back on top where he belonged.
There are dozens of artists whose stories are similar to Copas’ in that they are unfortunately being lost to time.

John Roger Simon, a southern Ohio native and professor of music at Shawnee State University, has taken on the honorable task of producing a thoroughly researched and enjoyable biography of a deserving artist. In the first several chapters, Simon takes a keen and personal interest in the conditions under which Copas grew up. He interviews many people who knew Copas and his family and draws a portrait of the community that contributed to the character of Lloyd Copas.

The theme of community that is established early in the book in talking about the small communities in which Copas was raised carries on throughout the book as those communities are replaced by the community of country music singers. In hearing the stories of country stars of this time, the late-1940s through the 1960s, there was a sense of community that appears to be lacking in today’s music world.

The subtitle of the book, “And The Golden Age of Country Music,” is covered in the book through interviews with and anecdotes concerning stars like Ralph Emery, Johnny Wright, Kitty Wells, Jimmy Dickens, Lazy Jim Day, Pee Wee King, Hank Williams and many other country music stars of the 1950s and ‘60s. Several of the artists interviewed have passed on and it is good to have their stories and recollections recorded for posterity.

Simon has written the only full-length biography of Cowboy Copas. With much detail and style he has captured the story of one of country music’s stars that runs the risk of being forgotten by today’s fans. Fans of country music history will want to have this book in their library for the firsthand tales of the road from many of the stars of yesteryear and to honor the memory of a great artist.

Interview with Barry Mazor

2008-10-20T06:05:00.001-07:00

If you read a lot of music journalism you have no doubt run across the name Barry Mazor. A Senior Editor for No Depression, his work has appeared in many of the magazines and he has two articles in the new No Depression bookazine. In addition to that, he has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, the Nashville Scene and many others. He currently writes a bi-weekly column at the new No Depression Web site and has recently finished his first book.

Music Tomes: How did you get into music writing?

Barry Mazor: If you’d asked me the “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question when I was a kid, most of the time I would have answered “A writer,” even then. It was that basic and inevitable for me; I wrote for my junior high school paper, high school paper and yearbook. Meanwhile, one of my main childhood joys was getting to pick and buy a 45 record of the week — and my choices by age 5 or 6 were already pretty rootsy! I grew up in a fairly show business-oriented family, and music always loomed large, and during my college years, in Washington, D.C., in 1967-’71, I just immersed myself in the whole history of country music, blues, folk — and, of course, the rock and pop was everywhere. I was, in effect, though there was no term for it, an on-air “Americana” college disc jockey, too, circa 1969-’71. After graduating college, I immediately went to work in publishing in New York. I began writing about pop and roots music professionally in my twenties, in the ‘70s; you could have found my writing about more or less the same sorts of acts I cover for No Depression or The Wall Street Journal today in Crawdaddy magazine or the Soho Weekly News. I’d, in fact, stopped doing music writing for quite a while when I returned to it in the late ‘90s.

MT: What is the hardest part of the writing process for you?

BM: I think the honest answer would be transcribing all of those interviews! Just for my oncoming book Meeting Jimmie Rodgers I did about 90 of them. I bet that I would have had it done sooner if audio interviews magically typed themselves out. The technology is not really quite there for it to be that easy—though it’s getting closer.

MT: Can you tell us a little about your new project?

BM: It’s my attempt to do something that I think is a pretty fresh idea — to trace the impact of a major popular music performer and innovator from his time to ours, over 80 years, and around the globe. (The full title is Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century.) With Jimmie Rodgers as my subject, that means I need to go into - and get to go into - country, blues, folk, rock, bluegrass, cowboy, Western Swing, pop, jazz — you name it — because his music’s been taken up and built on, mutated even, in all of those fields. As far back as I can. I get to the “what happened and how did that happen” aspects of it and where they were gone before I could get to them, through a fairly massive amount of research, to find such testimony back in the historical records. It’s been quite a trip. The book is done now, it will be out next spring from Oxford University Press, and I’d have to say that it’s been the most exciting project I’ve ever been involved with.

MT: You have written a lot about music and are a recognized expert in the field of vernacular music, but this is your first music related book, I believe. Were there things about the book writing process that surprised you?

BM: No, you’re right, Eric. This is the first book on music of this scope that I’ve done, and it is, shall we say, something else again! The process has made more real to me — for all of the work I’ve done in publishing, as an editor as well as a writer — to another hard part of the work, which is tracking the overall thrust of the argument and keeping all the material coordinated and well-employed. That’s very different when you’re working at the length not of a two or eight-page article, but a 350-plus page book. You turn to a part of an argument in chapter eleven you first raised, in a different context, in chapter 4, and you have to get them to gel with each other. And you may have written the second half of the argument before the first.

You contributed to the new No Depression "bookazine" that was recently released. How do you see the "bookazine" differing from the magazine aside from the business aspects?

BM: Well, I’m not involved with the business aspects per se, but the No Depression bookazine is sold in bookstores and online at the NoDepression.com website — and carries no advertising. The first one’s out now, and it’s a twice a year periodical — sold more like a book — which has the room for those semi-famous No Depression epic artist profiles, stories large enough that most people don’t seem to want to stick with something of that scope online. A lot of news and reviews, columns and shorter features are being updated on the website, on the other hand, and more frequently than before. I’m one of those with an every-other-week column on the site, which changes daily.

MT: Can you recommend any essential reading?

BM: I’m happy to have the chance to do that. For country music, I’d say that the best fast introduction to what it’s all really about is a short book by Bill C. Malone — Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers; it clears away a lot of clichés, misconceptions and preconceptions in one afternoon’s reading. A fresh, important book out just last year, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry, by Diane Pecknold, is very good at looking at how what the audience has wanted from the music, and how the audience’s willing participation in country’s promotion has shaped it.

A book that played a big part in setting me off looking into the musical places between the benches for all these years is another short one, Tony Russell’s phenomenal Blacks, Whites and Blues. It spells out the scope of the musical interchange in American roots music — and points to the records you need to hear. It was out of print for a long time but is available again as a part of an anthology called Yonder Come the Blues. Another important book in the blues area: Big Road Blues by David Evans.

With endless books about the life and work of Bob Dylan out there, I’d mention Paul Williams’ Performing Artist: The Music of Bob Dylan, Volume One, as the one you shouldn’t miss. It stresses the performances, which always matter to me, rather than just his songwriting. Colin Escott’s Hank Williams bio is masterful. Also, to me it’s really important that this reading and writing about music that moves and shakes us not be some sort of painful obligation. It’s allowed to be fun and in that regard, as well as its ability to get hold of a complicated, fascinating character, I’d recommend Nick Tosches’ Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, as another all-time keeper.

Amazon.com Widgets

Weekend Reading

2008-10-17T12:29:00.000-07:00

I should have a new review for you all on Monday as well as a new interview next week. Until then, if you are starved for reading material over the weekend, here are some links to some of my older book reviews.

Down in Orburndale: A Songwriter's Youth in Old Florida
By Bobby Braddock

Country Music Originals The Legends and the Lost
By Tony Russell

Bluegrass Odyssey: A Documentary in Pictures and Words, 1966-86
By Carl Fleischhauer and Neil V. Rosenberg

The Music of Bill Monroe
By Neil V. Rosenberg and Charles K. Wolfe

Working Girl Blues: the Life & music of Hazel Dickens by Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone

Born In A Small Town: John Mellencamp by Heather Johnson

Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City by Craig Havighurst This was my favorite book of 2007.

Things are moving!

2008-10-15T06:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to all of the visitors that have stopped by the blog in the last few days and those who have taken the opportunity to send well-wishes. It is appreciated and encouraging.

I have some more author interviews coming up in the next few weeks, so I wanted to take the opportunity to say a little about the interview that will appear on the site. For the time being they will mainly be done through e-mail to accommodate the busy schedules of both the authors and myself. I've never felt e-mail interviews were the ideal interview situation since you generally get shorter, more terse replies from interviewees. But, if they all follow the wonderful example of Patsi Bale-Cox and take a little time to think their answers through we will be getting some good stuff. After all, these are writers, shouldn't they be able to write out a decent answer?

You may also notice that most of the interviews will include a few of the same questions. Questions like: "What do you find to be the hardest part of the writing process?" and "Why do you feel what you write about is important?" These will be included in nearly every interview on the site for the simple reason that I, as a writer myself, am not only interested in the topic of the book, but also the process.

I'll have a new review up towards the end of the week or this weekend, so stay tuned!

Interview with Patsi Bale-Cox

2008-10-13T06:18:00.000-07:00

I love all kinds of music, but anyone who knows me knows I love country music. I love not only listening to it, but I spend a good deal of time reading and studying about it. There are a lot of great biographies and autobiographies out there by country music stars. Nearly all of them are written with some who is adept at helping them properly tell their stories. One of those writers, and one of my favorites, is Patsi Bale-Cox. Patsi has written books with Jenny Jones, Tanya Tucker, Wynonna and Country Music Hall of Fame members Ralph Emery and Loretta Lynn. She was gracious enough to take the time to do an e-mail interview with Music Tomes to discuss her start in writing, her upcoming project and some recommendations for further reading.

Music Tomes: When did you realize you had a talent for writing?

Patsi Bale-Cox: I’m not sure I ever did on a conscious level. It was something that came naturally. My mother and four older sisters wrote – stories, journals. We were all avid readers, as well. Mother was on the state board that chose textbooks, so every summer vans arrived at our house with crates of books. I’d sit in a chair beside the stacks of texts, devouring everything. I love the smell of new books. I believe that most voracious readers can write if they want to do it.

My first writing attempts were actually re-writes. My mother played piano, mandolin and ukulele. Two of my sisters sang, with big Patsy Cline-type voices. I loved the music, but didn’t really have a talent for it. I hated piano lessons, played cornet and clarinet in the school bands at various times. But – and this is the truth – I was such a bad clarinet player the band director made me a twirler. Since I had no musical talent, in a musical family, I fit in by writing goofball lyrics to replace those of the songs they sang. I was the Homer and Jethro of our family.

MT: You’ve written books with Tanya, Ralph and Wynonna. How did you first come to be a “with”?

PBC: My first writing job was just out of college, for Plaza magazine in Kansas City. I went on to edit a women’s magazine, a film industry trade publication, a regional country music book titled Rocky Mountain Country, and, in 1983, moved to Nashville to write about country music full time. Over the years, I wrote everything from magazine articles to album liner notes to marketing overviews for labels. One of the notes I wrote in the early ‘90s was for Tanya’s box set on Capitol. She loved them, and told me that if she ever wrote a book she wanted me involved. However, she said, she doubted she’d ever do it.

At some point in 1994 Tanya’s father convinced her to sign a book contract, even though she in no way wanted to write a memoir. She insisted that I write it. The original publisher had brought in various writers for the job, but Tanya turned them down. I had written a novel by that time, a mystery titled If Thoughts Could Kill, with my sister. We published it under the pseudonym G.F. Bale, and it sold quite well. (My sister, Gladys, went on to write more mysteries under that name and the name Emma Brookes.)

Tanya’s original publisher finally hired me, reluctantly. They were convinced that I would white wash her life because Tanya and I were friends. And in fact that first publisher ended up turning down Nickel Dreams. They’d hoped for a raunchy tell all – sex, drugs & rock & roll – and that wasn’t something Tanya wanted to do. They also wanted little of her early life in the book. I can’t remember the exact page number they said, but it was something like: “You have thirty pages to get to Glen Campbell.” But Tanya’s early years are crucial to the story. Plus, I felt she was very open about her life, and it was often painful for her to talk about it. We were very happy that Hyperion stepped in and bought the book. They were a wonderful company to work with.

Frequently asked question: did Tanya read the book? Answer: no. I tried to get her to read the book, but she’d just laugh and say, “I lived that life, I don’t need to read about it.”

MT: What is your next project and how did you decide on the topic?

PBC: I have a book coming out in the spring of 2009, titled The Garth Factor: The Career Behind Country’s Big Boom. It is the story of his career, set within the times, the 1990s. I worked with Garth all through that decade and beyond. I worked for Capitol as a writer and in PR, so I saw what went down from both sides. One thing the book will show is that even the biggest superstars have to watch their backs when it comes to contracts, record labels and executives.

The other project I’m working on right now is another mystery/suspense novel with my sister Gladys. She recently spent a couple of months with me, and it was great. We’re about half finished.

MT: What is the hardest part of the writing process for you?

PBC: Typing the first sentence. I’ll do anything to put off writing – stare out the window, decide I need to do more research, eat lunch, make popcorn.

MT: Why do you feel that the topics you write about are important?

PBC: What a great question! My college degrees are in art and history, and for me, writing these books is an integral part of country music history. We have lost so many stories over the years, it makes me sick to think of it. One of my great regrets is that I never wrote a book with my dear friend Floyd Tillman. Two other missed opportunities involve friends, as well. Harlan Howard’s widow wanted me to write his biography, but we couldn’t convince any publishers to do it. The same thing happened with a book of recollections about Johnny Cash from a photographer friend of his. The friend, Chance Martin, has a treasure trove of original photos. In fact, he’s the person who taught Johnny to take photographs. But we couldn’t sell that idea either. I worked closely with both Johnny and Harlan – adored both of them – and so having those projects turned down was heart breaking. If I ever win the lottery I’ll finance both books myself!

MT: Can you recommend a couple of books?

PBC: Just go down to the Country Music Hall of Fame and buy everything in the bookstore! Seriously, here’s a few of my favorites:

Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music by Mary Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann

A Good Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry by Charles K. Wolfe

Country on Compact Disc, edited by Paul Kingsbury for the Country Music Foundation

Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’ by Bill C. Malone

This Wheel’s On Fire by Levon Helm

You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke by Daniel Wolff

True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass; Jimmy Martin by Tom Piazza

The Kingdom of Zydeco by Michael Tisserand

The Nashville Sound by Joli Jensen

The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry by Diane Pecknold

One final note, and some shameless self-promotion. I learned a tremendous amount from the two books I did with Ralph Emery. I was so very proud and happy that he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He honestly believed he would never live to see it happen. I recommend both books for country history lovers. And another book I’d recommend, especially for baby boomers, is the one I did with Tony Orlando, Halfway to Paradise. Tony’s story included the Brill Building/’50s pop idol world, to ‘70s singles-driven pop to network television. He’s worked on both sides of music, business and creative, as a publisher and as an artist. It’s a very interesting journey through important years in pop culture. (Disclaimer from Patsi– I won’t make any money if you buy any of these books. Just wanted to mention them!)

Amazon.com Widgets

Review: Behind The Grand Ole Opry Curtain – Robert K. Oermann

2008-10-08T05:01:00.000-07:00

[This review also appears at Americana Roots]

In the brief introduction to his newest book longtime Nashville insider and music critic Robert K. Oermann notes that what has always set the Grand Ole Opry apart are the people, whether the people on the stage or the people in the audience. From the often told stories to the more obscure, Oermann goes on to tell about many of those artists who have throughout the years stood on that Opry stage.

If you are looking for backstage gossip, as the title might suggest, you will be disappointed. The subtitle of the book, “Tales of Romance and Tragedy,” comes closer to being a more complete description of what you’ll find in the 33 chapters Oermann offers up.

It seems his purpose was to draw back that Grand Ole Opry curtain and show the Opry members as more than just artists. Oermann goes to great efforts and research to show these artists as people. People that go through hard times, that love, and some that suffer. He does an admirable job of making that point. Each chapter is a stand alone mini-biography covering one or more of the Opry stars.

Oermann covers some of the stories most familiar to fans of country music, such as those of the legends like Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, Hank Williams, George Jones, Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson whose stories have been told often. He also covers some of the “younger” members of the Opry like Hal Ketchum, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, Randy Travis, Dierks Bentley and Josh Turner.

The book is heavy on the romance part of the equation telling of how these Opry members met their significant other and stories of their time together. It is this aspect of the story that goes the longest way in humanizing the artists we often only see on stage.

Where the book really shines is in the exposition of stars that stand to be forgotten by many members of the audience due to their death or at least their music going out of favor with the public. Oermann gives detailed and well-researched accounts of the lives and careers of artists including The Wilburn Brothers, Johnny Paycheck, Faron Young, Little Jimmy Dickens and Mel Tillis. He devotes a chapter to the artists lost to the “Opry Curse” of the early 1960s, Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, Jack Anglin and Texas Ruby. He also devotes a chapter to an overview of duet partners such as the Davis Sisters, The Osborne Brothers, The Stanley Brothers and Jim & Jesse.

For the student of country music, one who has read widely in the field, this book probably won’t offer that much new information (although it is nice to have some of the facts and stories collected in a single volume), but for new fans of country music or longtime fans who want to dig a little deeper, Oermann offers a wide selection of artist that are sure to include at least a few favorites and enough information to either satisfy readers or allow them a place to jump off on their search for more information.

Finally Back!

2008-10-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

I signed up for this blog with every intention of posting on a regular basis. I'll save the excuses, but suffice to say I am finally back and I hope to make regular posts from here on out.

Coming up I will have a review of the new Robert K. Oermann book, "Behind The Curtain of the Grand Ole Opry." Also on the horizon are reviews for the new, and long overdue, biography of Cowboy Copas, which I am reading now. I also received "The Hayloft Gang" in the mail yesterday so that will also be on its way.

Most of these reviews will also appear on Americana Roots (www.americanaroots.com), unless the topic of the book doesn't fit over there (like the Van Halen bio I received in the mail last week), in which case the review will appear exclusively here.

When time permits I will also be posting some short Q & A style interviews with authors.

This is far from an exhaustive list (mainly just what interests me), but here are some upcoming releases:
Oct. 20:
"Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music" by Ted Gioia (W. W. Norton)

Nov. 1:
"Complete Guide To The Music Of Johnny Cash" by Peter Hogan (Omnibus)
"Country Music: The Masters" by Marty Stuart (Sourcebooks MediaFusion)
"Hot Burritos: The True Story of The Flying Burrito Brothers" by John Einarson with Chris Hillman (Jawbone Press)
"Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music" by Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching (University of Michigan Press)
"Outlaw: The Kris Kristofferson Story" by Stephen Miller (Omnibus Press)

Nov. 4:
"Born Country: How Faith, Family, and Music Brought Me Home" by Randy Owen (HarperOne)

Nov. 11:
"Sinatra in Hollywood" by Tom Santopietro (Thomas Dunne Books)

Nov. 14:
"Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods" by Annie J. Randall (Oxford University Press)

Nov. 19:
"Country Music Humorists and Comedians" by Loyal Jones (University of Illinois Press)

Dec. 1:
"Pure Country: The Leon Kagarise Archives, 1961-1971" by Eddie Dean (Daniel 13/Process)

Welcome!

2007-08-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

Current read: Red Birds Remember by Joe Taylor
Currently playing: "Here, There and Everywhere" by The Beatles (via Pandora)

Thanks for stopping by. Here you will find discussion of books dealing with music in all forms. There will be author interviews, reviews, previews and general talk.

I will also be sharing interesting (to me at elast, and hopefully to you) notes on things I run across in my research for various projects.

More coming soon!