Country Music USA - Classic American Country Songs & Albums | Perfect for Road Trips, Parties & Relaxation

All of the praise heaped on this book is justified. A more comprehensive survey of North American country music cannot be imagined—and, if it could be, your head would explode. For a book that originated as a doctoral dissertation, it is amazingly well written by one who knows how to tell a good, if very complicated, story. Equally important, he and his younger co-author Tracey Laird know when to stop, then move on to something else. This golden anniversary edition, from anonymous balladeers to Béyonce, weighs in at 748 pages, the last sixteen of which (set in two-columns and what looks like 8-point type) consist only of all the song titles mentioned. If you want to learn even more, the authors have compiled a ninety-page collection of bibliographical essays on which their opus ends. (The only error I spotted is on p. 390, whose caption of a picture of Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt reverses the order of the photographed subjects' names.) The book is a masterly interweaving of music, biography, entertainment, sociology, religion, politics, and business: a microcosm of America that somehow manages to be a page-turner. All this, for just over 25 bucks.UPDATE 09.15.19: Malone is the lone academician among the talking heads in Ken Burns's splendid PBS documentary, "Country Music," which premiered on this date. At one point he astutely observes, “I think there’s a paradox that has always existed in country music: How much change do you embrace? And how much change can you make without completely obliterating what you were?” That's a theme that runs, not only through Burns's sixteen-hour compression of this complicated history, but throughout the American story itself.