Author: Charles Wolfe
Publisher: Vanderbilt Univ Press - Country Music Foundation Press
Keywords: music, foundation, press, country, vanderbilt, masters, southern, fiddling, devil
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 1997-04-30
List price: $22.95
ISBN-10: 0826513247
ISBN-13: 9780826513243

A unique and illuminating overview of the traditions of Southern fiddling, covering the key performers and compositions that defined that genre during its golden age--from the 1920s to the 1950s--and that continue to influence popular music today.It was called "the devil’s box" because the instrument was thought to be sinful to play. Yet in spite of (or perhaps partially because of) that stigma, the fiddle has long been one of America’s favorite instruments.Easily portable, stylistically versatile, and possessing an enchanting timbre, it accompanied the European settlers across Ame

Author: Tom Piazza
Publisher: Vanderbilt Univ Press - Country Music Foundation Press
Keywords: jimmy, martin, bluegrass, king, adventures, true
Number of Pages: 112
Published: 2009-09-18
List price: $12.95
ISBN-10: 0826516807
ISBN-13: 9780826516800

Jimmy Martin was just twenty-two years old when Bill Monroe asked him to join the Blue Grass Boys. That invitation was the start of a career that spanned half a century and culminated with Martin’s induction into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Honor. Always an enigmatic figure, Martin was as famous for his temper as he was for his talent. On assignment from the Oxford American magazine, fiction writer and music critic Tom Piazza drove from his home in New Orleans to Nashville to interview Martin and found himself pitched headlong into a world he couldn

Author: Marshall Chapman
Publisher: Vanderbilt Univ Press - Country Music Foundation Press
Keywords: nashville
Number of Pages: 296
Published: 2010-10-30
List price: $25.00
ISBN-10: 0826517358
ISBN-13: 9780826517357

Marshall Chapman knows Nashville. A musician, songwriter, and author with nearly a dozen albums and a bestselling memoir under her belt, Chapman has lived and breathed Music City for over forty years. Her friendships with those who helped make Nashville one of the major forces in American music culture is unsurpassed. And in her new book, They Came to Nashville, the reader is invited to see Marshall Chapman as never before--as music journalist extraordinaire.In They Came to Nashville, Chapman records the personal stories of musicians shaping the modern history of music in Nashville, from th

Author: Ruth Sheldon
Publisher: Country Music Foundation Press
Keywords: hubbin, wills, bob
Number of Pages: 128
Published: 1995-08-31
List price: $12.95
ISBN-10: 0915608189
ISBN-13: 9780915608188

Unavailable for decades, this pioneering biography of the King of Western Swing returns to print in a handsome new edition with photographs, index, and a new critical introduction.Few figures in country music’s history have left as distinctive and lasting an impression as Bob Wills (1905-1975). An expert fiddler and a magnetic showman, Wills popularized a style of Southwestern dance music known as western swing, a rhythmic hybrid of Texas fiddle music, blues, and big band swing that set dance halls alight across the Southwest in the thirties and forties. Despite his passing, his legacy h

Author: Charles K. Wolfe
Publisher: Country Music Foundation Pre
Keywords: ole, opry, grand, birth, riot, natured
Number of Pages: 352
Published: 1999-05-28
List price: $29.95
ISBN-10: 082651331X
ISBN-13: 9780826513311

When Nashville’s National Life and Accident Insurance Company created radio station WSM as an advertising vehicle--the call letters representing their corporate slogan, "We Shield Millions"--no one suspected its "old-time music" program would one day be country music’s shining star. In A Good-Natured Riot, author Charles Wolfe offers a thorough, valuable examination of the Grand Ole Opry’s formative years, answering the questions that the genre’s recorded history cannot (simply because most of the Opry’s earliest stalwarts were part-time musicians who were rarely

Author: Michael Eldridge
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Keywords: vanderbilt, library, american, philosophy, instrumentalism, cultural, experience, john, dewey, transforming
Number of Pages: 240
Published: 1998-07-16
List price: $45.00
ISBN-10: 0826513077
ISBN-13: 9780826513076

Author: Esther Isabelle Wilder
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Keywords: cord, injury, spinal, living, dealing, wheeling
Number of Pages: 368
Published: 2006-09-29
List price: $34.95
ISBN-10: 0826515355
ISBN-13: 9780826515353

Before his motorcycle accident, Travis saw himself becoming a pro football player. Now, paralyzed from the nipple down, he says, "At times it’s a pain in the ass-literally and figuratively. But it allows me to not be as threatening to some people [the way I was when] I was still an athlete. Because a lot of times male interaction is done on the basis of pissing contests: I’m bigger, I’m tougher, I’m stronger, I’m smarter. When you’re in a chair, they don’t look at you like that." At the same time, Travis complains that many people are uncomfortabl