Contrary to popular belief, the roots of American country music do not lie solely on southern farms or in mountain hollows. Rather, much of this music recorded before World War II emerged from the bustling cities and towns of the Piedmont South. No group contributed more to the commercialization of early country music than southern factory workers. In Linthead Stomp, Patrick Huber explores the origins and development of this music in the Piedmont's mill villages. Huber offers vivid portraits of a colorful cast of Piedmont millhand musicians, including Fiddlin' John Carson, Charlie Poole, Dave McCarn, and the Dixon Brothers, and considers the impact that urban living, industrial work, and mass culture had on their lives and music. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including rare 78-rpm recordings and unpublished interviews, Huber reveals how the country music recorded between 1922 and 1942 was just as modern as the jazz music of the same era. Linthead Stomp celebrates the Piedmont millhand fiddlers, guitarists, and banjo pickers who combined the collective memories of the rural countryside with the upheavals of urban-industrial life to create a distinctive American music that spoke to the changing realities of the twentieth-century South.

An exploration of the origins and development of American country music in the Piedmont's mill villages celebrates the colorful cast of musicians and considers the impact that urban living, industrial music, and mass culture had on their lives and music.

Poetry. 'I took much trouble into myself, ' says Tim Earley at the beginning of this audacious and revelatory book. Like an Appalachian Whitman, he consumes everything -- work, kinship, sex, love, illness, religion, and violence (both invasion and self-harm) -- and '[vomits] out the old weird America.' Earley sings in 'impossible registers, ' rivaling fellow white trash iconoclast Axl Rose's famous vocal range. He gives us Dauphins and Goody powder, 'pure spirit' and Spam, moving easily between the ludicrous and the sublime. Every page of this book is scrawled with stupendous feats of language, but LINTHEAD STOMP is no mere verbal flood. It is an elegy for a 'cousin who died in restraints at the mental hospital in Morganton, ' a brother so distraught over the death of Dale Earnhardt he loses fifty pounds, a friend going mad in a trailer full of pills and Spanish art. It is a tribute to a people who have been ridiculed, patronized, exploited, and ignored. Terrifying and heartfelt, urgent and absurd, LINTHEAD STOMP is Earley at his most devastating and delightful. A truly transcendent book. --Mark Neely

Country music in the Carolinas and the southern Appalachian Mountains owes a tremendous debt to freedom-loving Scotch-Irish pioneers who settled the southern backcountry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These hardy Protestant settlers brought with them from Lowland Scotland, Northern England and the Ulster Province of Ireland music that created the essential framework for "old-time string band music." From the cabins of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains to the textile mills and urban centers of the Carolina foothills, this colorful, passionate, heartfelt music transformed the culture of America and the world and laid the foundation for western swing, bluegrass, rockabilly and modern country music. Author Michael Scoggins takes a trip to the roots of country music in the Carolinas.

Approaches country music through an interdisciplinary lens, Features close analyses of gendered and racial disparities in country music, Examines politics of both the performance of country music and the scholarship surrounding it Book jacket.

In The Country Music Reader Travis D. Stimeling provides an anthology of primary source readings from newspapers, magazines, and fan ephemera encompassing the history of country music from circa 1900 to the present. Presenting conversations that have shaped historical understandings of country music, it brings the voices of country artists and songwriters, music industry insiders, critics, and fans together in a vibrant conversation about a widely loved yet seldom studied genre of American popular music. Situating each source chronologically within its specific musical or cultural context, Stimeling traces the history of country music from the fiddle contests and ballad collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the most recent developments in contemporary country music. Drawing from a vast array of sources including popular magazines, fan newsletters, trade publications, and artist biographies, The Country Music Reader offers firsthand insight into the changing role of country music within both the music industry and American musical culture, and presents a rich resource for university students, popular music scholars, and country music fans alike.

"Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City, 1945-1975 is the first history of record production during country music's so-called "Nashville Sound" era. This period of country music history produced some of the genre's most celebrated recording artists, including Country Music Hall of Fame inductees Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, and Floyd Cramer, and marked the establishment of a recording industry that has come to define Nashville in the national and international consciousness. Yet, despite country music's overwhelming popularity during this period and the continued legacy of the studios that were built in Nashville during the 1950s and 1960s, little attention has been given to the ways in which recording engineers, session musicians, and record producers shaped the sounds of country music during the time. Drawing upon a rich array of previously unexplored primary sources, Nashville Cats: Record Production in Nashville, 1945-1975 is the first book to take a global view of record production in Nashville during the three decades that the city's musicians established the city as the leading center for the production and distribution of country music"--