Tag: country music

Although the sound of the music has changed, country’s themes have endured.

“First, you exclude black people from the festivals. Then write them out by not recording them. And pretty soon, ‘you have this manufactured image of country music being white and being poor.'”

Before they released “Wichita Lineman,” the greatest unfinished song of all time, Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb lived surprisingly parallel lives.

The story of Sadlack’s Heroes, the Raleigh dive bar that helped galvanize the alternative country scene in the 1990s.

The co-authors of ‘Country Music USA’ – a revised edition of the genre’s definitive history – talk about the music’s African-American tributaries, its unpredictable politics, country radio’s woman problem, and working on Ken Burns’ forthcoming doc.

How did cowboy hats and boots become the visual iconography of American rural music?

No one would have thought that Highland Ridge, Virginia was the center of anything. Then Jim McCoy’s honky-tonk came along.

“The trills in his notes sputter and lift. He sounds like an animal in trouble. Like a lounge singer who’s lost his mind.”

What a blast! But there’s danger in the air─someone on the dark floor’s got a gun, and everyone “does his best to act just right, ’cause it’s gonna be a funeral if you start a fight.” In [Billy] Hughes’s terms, folks “struggle and they shuffle” until the sun comes up, delicate diction for a Saturday […]

Four Stories About Merle Haggard.

A night at the San Joaquin Valley’s last historic honky-tonk.