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Category Archives: Books
Marty Stuart To Debut “The Marty Stuart Show” on RFD-TV in November
- Ellensburg, Washington based alt.country artist Star Anna is already a Twang Nation favorite and has tickled our fancy even further by offering an excellent ‘Crooked Path Live EP‘ available for download at Amazon. The digital four track EP release includes live versions of Crooked Path, Bed That I’ve Made, Five Minutes To Midnight and a never before released track, Push It Through. Star Anna will be appearing at Seattle’s Bumbershoot music festival.
- Texas Yoda and Country Music legend Willie Nelson’s debut novel “A Tale Out Of Luck” (Center Street Books) should not to be confused with Willie’s album “A Tale Out of Luck” which features the excellent song “Home Motel.” The book is the story of Retired Texas Ranger Captain Hank Tomlinson who must attempt to keep his sons safe from vengeful Comanche warriors while trying to catch a murderer who he knows will soon strike again. The name of the book and the album are a play off the name of Luck Texas which is an old western town built in 1986 on Willie Nelson’s ranch for the filming of “Red Headed Stranger.
- Four-time GRAMMY winner and Country Music Icon Marty Stuart will premiere his new television series The Marty Stuart Show this November starting with the first 26 episodes airing Sunday nights on RFD-TV. The Marty Stuart Show will begin production in September at Nashville’s NorthStar Studios, home of RFD-TV. The 30-minute episodes, hosted and produced by Stuart, will be a part of RFD-TV’s new Sunday night prime time lineup with HEE HAW, Postcards From Nebraska, and Music & Motors. Each show will feature music by Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives, as well as his wife Country Queen Connie Smith and performance segments from the best that country music and American music has to offer. Radio personality Eddie Stubbs will serve as the show’s announcer and Stuart’s sidekick on every episode.
- Stuart will also release his second photography book Country Music: The Masters on Nov. 11.  Chicago’s Source Books will publish the 342 page collection that includes Stuart’s personal photos of friends including Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Buck Owens, Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Ray Charles and more.  The book’s forward is written by long-time pal and country music fan Billy Bob Thornton.
Pitchfork’s Amanda Petrusich Surveys Americana Music In New Book
Amanda Petrusich has interviewed Liz Phair and Feist for Pitchfork.tv, not she turnes her talents to documenting the vast and rugged territory that is Americana.
From Pitchfork.com: “It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music. (Her first book was last year’s entry on Nick Drake’s Pink Moon in the 33 1/3 series.) Part memoir and travelogue, part sociological study and piece of criticism, It Still Moves features stories and interviews that explore the history and current state of Americana, “from Elvis to Iron and Wine, the Carter Family to Animal Collective, Johnny Cash to Will Oldham,” according to a press release.”
She’s taken on quite a task here but I look forward to reading “It Still Moves.”
A few events celebrating It Still Moves’ publication are scheduled throughout the coming months.
It Still Moves events:
09-11 Brooklyn, NY – Book Court
09-18 Brooklyn, NY – WORD
09-19 Nashville, TN – Americana Music Association Festival
09-23 New York, NY – KGB Bar
10-09 Oxford, MS – Thacker Mountain Radio
10-10 Nashville, TN – Southern Festival of Books
11-01 Austin, TX – Texas Book Festival
God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre by Richard Grant
It’s no great feat for a travel writer to make me long for white-sandy beaches, warm turquoise oceans and ice cold cervezas. It’s a much more challenging feat for a writer make me want to risk my life and travel up the Devil’s Backbone, Mexico’s violent and exotic Sierra Madre Occidental, where last of Geronimo’s Apache braves are rumored to have taken refuge and the birth and assassination local for Pancho Villa. Richard Grant, a ex-pat Brit and freelance journalist with a pair of balls as large as his sense of adventure and and equal measures of level of self-delusion and self-preservation has done just that.
When French surrealist André Breton visited Mexico he commented, “Our art movement is not needed in this country.” Grant gives truth to this statement with his fantastic book “God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre” by delving into a land of contradictions, desperate poverty, elaborate narco-mansions, and levels of casual cultural violence that can only be paralleled to America to the 17th century wild west or the current history of parts of the Middle East. People are killed, woman are raped and then forced to marry their rapist, goofd people are forced into raising “the crop that sells” just to feed their families and the locals shrug their shoulders in the existential futility of ” ¿Qué puede ser hecha?”
Poor farmers, forced by the drug cartels to grow marijuana and opium, are harassed by the police and military when rival drug lords pay them as muscle to destroy or simply steal their crops. These same families follow chains of revenge that wipe out entire families and the drug lords pray to their own “narco-saint”, Jesús Malverde, so the federales will not see their crops and that their bullets fly straight and true.
Young men are hired as narco-vaqueros and lurk the streets as muscle blaring narcocorrido (A Mexican version of Gangsta Rap) blaring from 30k trucks speakers and brandishing their “cuerno de chivo” which translate to “goat’s horn” and refers to the curved magazine clip in the armament of choice, the AK47. The danger is tweaked upward with handfuls of cocaine chased down by cases of beer and Lechuguilla, a variety of potent bootleg tequila that, if drunk right from the still, can permanently damage your throat.
It’s not all dire, the Gringo meets up with some interesting and funny characters not least of all author and real cowboy Joe Brown. And his direct translations of the colloquial curses are hysterical.
During his journey into the place where “first the event happens, then it is denied, and then the myths are created” Grant reflects on his bourgeois ennui that set him on his treacherous journey and ultimately attempts to make more out of it, something more noble then just a Gonzo walkabout. His attempts at nobility are arguable, but there’s no debate that it led to a great story.
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Iron-N-Ink Tattoo and Kustom Culture Festival – Long Beach, CA June 6-8
Looking for a cool place to get a tattoo, see some pin up girls, check out some classic cars, get married on the Queen Marry and catch some great Americana music this summer? Then head over to the Iron-N-Ink Tattoo and Kustom Culture Festival in Long Beach, CA June 6-8.
On the bill is Wayne Hancock, The Blasters, Dale Watson, Rosie Flores, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Junior Brown, The Lonesome Spurs and much more.
Dixie Lullaby – Review
Dixie Lullaby : A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South (Free Press/Simon & Schuster) by Mark Kemp
Kemp is a native of South Carolina and born in 1960 and came of age at the time the civil rights movement kicked into the high gear and the old Jim Crow order of the South was breaking down. During a time when kids are trying to find their identity it was even more difficult for a son of the South during those turbulent times.
Kemp found refuge in the then burgeoning Southern rock bands, led by the Macon, Georgia’s Allman Brothers Band and followed soon after my Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Charlie Daniels Band, Black Oak Arkansas, Molly Hatchet, Blackfoot, the Marshall Tucker band. Though also infatuated with many of the British Invasion bands these other bands were
tapping subject matter in styles that working class white Southerners could use to help the transition of identity in the New South.
The seemingly paradoxical identity, what Patterson Hood of the Drive By Truckers refers to on the bands opus “Southern Rock Opera” as the “Duality of the Southern Thing” manifested itself in a generation of young Southerners that are both proud of their environment but ashamed at the history that haunts it. Kemp grows to reject Southern music and much of his heritage, moves to New York City where he lands, and due largely to drug problem loses, his dream job at Rolling Stone Magazine. Kemp’s personal journey is nicely paralleled with his Southern travels with his Dad and interviews with musicians and
key individuals like Charlie Daniels, Warren Haynes of the Allman Brothers Band and Gov’t Mule, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ed King and so many others. Some of the highlights of the book is the conversations with Phil Walden, former manager for Otis Redding and the Allman Bothers and founder of the fabled Capricorn Records and his 1992 interview with testy Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson who apparently bristles at the Southern Rock moniker.
I’m within a few years of Mr. Kemp and grew up in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, and I can attest that the stories in “Dixie Lullaby” ring true to experience in leaving the South for New York City (as Kemp did) and carrying a sort of defensive pride for my roots. This comes out most prevalently was what I like to call the “ugly sister effect.” I can talk shit about Texas all day long (corrupt politicians abuse of the death penalty for one), but it makes me mad when others not from the South, and sometimes never been South of the Mason/Dixon, talks trash about the region. Like I can say my sister’s ugly (she’s not though, sorry sis) but by god if you do you’ll get your ass handed to you. Complex, no?
Dixie Lullaby is a great piece of Southern cultural history well told.
30 Years on the Road with Gene Autry – Book Event
Something else to to do if you;re headed to the Americana Music Conference.
Nashville, TN (October 16, 2007) – Sherry Bond, the daughter of the late Johnny Bond, will unveil her father’s newly published book, 30 YEARS ON THE ROAD WITH GENE AUTRY, in the SunTrust Community Room at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum at 1 p.m. on Friday, November 2. This free event includes a discussion of the book (led by Sherry) and a live music performance by Ranger Doug of Riders in the Sky, followed by a book signing in the Museum Store.
Bond, an Oklahoma-born singer-songwriter, was inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame (1999) and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (1970). He was a gifted entertainer and comedian who joined Autry’s entourage in 1940 as part of the Jimmy Wakely Trio. Johnny appeared on countless radio programs and numerous films; performed as a country artist in his own right (“Hot Rod Lincoln”); and wrote hits such as “Cimarron” and “Ten Little Bottles.”
Published by Riverwood Press and the Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Lone Pine Film History, the book is a boon to lovers of the “Western” in “Country and Western” music. Tales of the road; insights into the long Bond and Autry association; and Autry’s personal side are explored in a warm, conversational style. Johnny’s admiration for Gene is evident; priceless photographs abound; and this memoir offers us, finally, a wealth of information on both men – and the times they shared.
Buy the book here.
Johnny Cash’s First Wife, Vivian, Book Due Sept. 4
Johnny Cash’s first wife, the late Vivian Liberto Distin, will have her book I Walked the Line: My Life With Johnny posthumously released on Sept. 4 by Scribner Books. Before her death in 2005, Vivian told her story to TV producer Ann Sharpsteen, who shares an author credit on the book.
Vivian describes Cash’s early career, how June Carter entered their life and Vivian and Johnny’s divorce in 1966. Vivian is the mother of Cash’s four daughters. One of the daughters, Kathy Cash, says, “This book is the greatest part of my mother’s legacy as a wife, a grandmother, a matriarch, a mother and, most important, a woman in love.”
The book is based on thousands of letters exchanged by the couple before their marriage while he was overseas with the Air Force, co-writer Ann Sharpsteen said.
“The letters really reveal the real man, unclouded by drugs. Letters were his dreams, fears, a variety of subjects, fidelity, alcohol, faith. It’s like reading someone’s diary,†Sharpsteen said.
Kathy Cash, one of Johnny and Vivian’s daughters, said her mother visited her father in 2003 to tell him she wanted to do the book.
“He said, ‘Vivian, if anyone on this whole earth should write a book it should be you,â€â€™ Kathy Cash said.
Distin was portrayed by Ginnifer Goodwin in the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. According to Kathy, the portrayal was inaccurate and unfair to her mother. John Carter Cash, Kathleen’s half-brother and executive producer of the film, responded that he understood her concerns
Review of Graeme Thomson’s “The Outlaw”
Adam Lee Davies at Time Out London has reviewed Graeme Thomson’s Bio of Willie Nelson “The Outlaw” and given it 5 out of 6 stars. I’ll review the book myself once I get my hands on it.
Ain’t Got No Cigarettes: Memories of Music Legend Roger Miller – Lyle E. Style
Lyle E Style (yes that is his real name) is a country singer/songwriter from Canada that wanted to know more about the life of Roger Miller he found books on the singer/songwriter scarce. So he did what anybody would do…persuade some of the most famous country artists to spend time with him to talk about memories of Miller and wrote his own damn book, Ain’t Got No Cigarettes: Memories of Music Legend Roger Miller. And it’s a gem!
Buck Owens, Bobby Bare, Roy Clark, David Allan Coe, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson are just a few of the legends that took time to talk to Style about Roger and two things seem to be universally agreed upon by all parties, Roger was a genius and he was loved by all of them. Sure he was an addict (amphetamines and coca-cola) and pissed away a lot of money (sending Lear jets from Las Angeles to Nashville to pick up Bar-B-Que!) but all the stroes and with fond memories.
I had vague memories of driving around with my mom in her huge Olds Delta 88 and hearing Roger’s songs playing endlessly on the radio. For a stretch you couldn’t escape his songs – “Dang Meâ€, “King of the Road†and “Husbands and Wives.†These songs were as ubiquitous as Ashlee Simpson or The Black-Eyed Peas are today…but without sucking.
Roger Miller passed away far too young, at the age of 56, in October of 1992, of cancer.
He left a legacy that shines in the heart of all the old-school Nashville outlaws and legends that still remember him warmly.