Country music evokes a simple, agrarian past, with images of open land and pickup trucks. While some might think of the genre as a repository of nostalgia, popular because it preserves and reveres traditional values, Jeremy Hill argues that country music has found such expansive success because its songs and its people have forcefully addressed social and cultural issues as well as geographic change. Hill demonstrates how the genre and its fans developed a flexible idea of "country," beyond their rural roots, and how this flexibility allowed fans and music to "come to town," to move into...
Country music evokes a simple, agrarian past, with images of open land and pickup trucks. While some might think of the genre as a repository of no...
Many associate early western music with the likes of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but America's first western music craze predates these "singing cowboys" by decades. Written by Tin Pan Alley songsters in the era before radio, the first popular cowboy and Indian songs circulated as piano sheet music and as cylinder and disc recordings played on wind-up talking machines.
The colorful fantasies of western life depicted in these songs capitalized on popular fascination with the West stoked by Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, Owen Wister's novel The Virginian, and Edwin S....
Many associate early western music with the likes of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but America's first western music craze predates these "singing...
For over fifty years, Bill C. Malone has researched and written about the history of country music. Today he is celebrated as the foremost authority on this distinctly American genre. This new collection brings together his significant article-length work from a variety of sources, including essays, book chapters, and record liner notes. Sing Me Back Home distills a lifetime of thinking about country and southern roots music. Malone offers the heartfelt story of his own working-class upbringing in rural East Texas, recounting how in 1939 his family s first radio, a...
For over fifty years, Bill C. Malone has researched and written about the history of country music. Today he is celebrated as the foremost author...
Massively popular for the past century, country music has often been associated with political and social conservatism. Bringing together a wide spectrum of cultural critics, The Honky Tonk on the Left takes on this conservative stereotype and reveals how progressive thought has permeated country music from its beginnings to the present day.
Massively popular for the past century, country music has often been associated with political and social conservatism. Bringing together a wide spect...
