Country music is America’s music—which is to say, music from every culture and ethnicity. An essential guide.
Lucid, jam-packed, richly illustrated companion to the Ken Burns documentary series.
Was Earl Scruggs the Eddie Van Halen of his day? Quoting John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Duncan (Seed of the Future: Yosemite and the Evolution of the National Park Idea, 2013, etc.) makes the connection between the banjo master and the guitar shredder: “It was so fast. It was what excited people.” In the same way, Hank Williams was a punk rocker in his time, while Willie Nelson—well, Willie is unmistakably himself. As Rhiannon Giddens, of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, has lately been demonstrating, country music is the music of rural blacks, whites, and Native people, a style, writes the author, that “was not invented; it emerged.” Rising from the bottom up and drawing, like the blues, on black gospel, country music was popularized by the new medium of radio, becoming a staple through “hillbilly” variety shows throughout the South. As a mix of ethnic forms, it ironically slipped through Henry Ford’s racist denunciation of jazz, gaining in popularity at the same time. Some country stars came to prominence accidentally: Roy Acuff might have been a baseball star had it not been for a case of sunstroke, and had he not been abused as a child, Hank Snow might not have run away from home. And then there are the working-class strivers: the ill-fated Williams, Wanda Jackson, Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline. Duncan has broad tastes and an appreciation for the many strains that feed into the musical form, so that Dwight Yoakam, the Judds, Gram Parsons, and Guy Clark get as much play as Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, and George Jones. He also tracks the rising and waning commercial fortunes of country, which found plenty of room for the likes of Garth Brooks and new pop-y stars while freezing out old-timers like Nelson and Cash.
Country music is America’s music—which is to say, music from every culture and ethnicity. An essential guide.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-52054-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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