One thing I’ll always admire Boy George for was his statement that he hated white people. True, it was just aimed to shock tabloid readers, but his explanation was that white was the absence of color, and without color, life was dull. Of course, he himself was Caucasian and British, but there’s no denying that [...]

There may be no more impenetrable roadblock to the enjoyment and evaluation of music (and art generally) than the matter of taste. Yet while it’s always lurking about even when it goes unmentioned — call it the Taste Card — it’s rarely interrogated with the rigor it deserves, or at all. It’s high time we [...]

It wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate just to strike “Industry” from this book’s subtitle. That’s because Diane Pecknold’s The Selling Sound argues that “the rise of country music” and “the rise of the country music industry” are, if not identical phenomena, at least entwined so inextricably that to imagine we can easily pinpoint where the former [...]

British writer and researcher Tony Russell has been authoring history-making contributions to our knowledge and understanding of American roots music since the 1970s, including his ground-breaking re-examination of interracial, cross-genre music history Blacks, Whites And Blues, and the recent, monumental Country Music Records: A Discography 1921-1942. Country Music Originals delivers a substantial body of new [...]

Former Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg is modern rock’s tenderest songwriter and its thorniest character, a contradiction journalists have been laboring for twenty years to reconcile. That author Jim Walsh, a longtime Minneapolis music journalist with ties to the band (he and Westerberg are friendly, and he gave a eulogy at former guitarist Bob Stinson’s funeral), [...]

Proud To Be An Okie is the most important volume of country music history to emerge in years, a worthy companion to Gerald Haslam’s similarly west-coast-centered Working Man Blues from 1999. Drawing upon everything from old fan magazines to the new whiteness studies, Peter La Chappelle focuses on country music and class about as well [...]

PHOTOGRAPHER Jim McGuire — from New Jersey, of all places — was comparatively new to Nashville when he made his two most indelible images. Both centered around the end times of the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium. One, with lightning circling the building, adorns the cover and sets the tone for this book [...]

It took Gram Parsons just over six years to change the face of American music. Parsons brought fresh force to country tradition with the International Submarine Band, remade the Byrds in his own image on the classic Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, founded the Flying Burrito Brothers, and recorded two solo albums of aching beauty, all [...]

Nearly every book-length country history or biography of any Grand Ole Opry-related performer includes obligatory background about WSM and the Opry’s history, usually recounting the Saturday night when George D. Hay spontaneously christened the station’s popular weekly old time music program the “Grand Ole Opry.” Add to that the “Midnite Jamboree” and Ralph Emery, and [...]

Warren Zevon and Townes Van Zandt are subjects of new biographies, but they had more in common than that. Both came from families with money. Music eventually took over everything that mattered to them. Both enjoyed high esteem among fellow artists, yet reaped limited commercial success. And both were brutal drunkards. There’s at least one [...]