In 1969, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, American music changed for ever. Bob Dylan, the most daredevil spirit of the rock era, took the stage for the first time with Johnny Cash, country music superstar. This show at the temple of country music, The Grand Ole Opry, was the most public evidence of a collision of styles which first occurred in the mid-1950s and has sent shockwaves through American music ever since. Country Rock, as played by the Byrds, the Eagles and Gram Parsons, was to become the dominant style in American music during the 1970s.
In 1969, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, American music changed for ever. Bob Dylan, the most daredevil spirit of the rock era, took the stage for the first time with Johnny Cash, country music superstar. This show at the temple of country music, The Grand Ole Opry, was the most public evidence of a collision of styles which first occurred in the mid-1950s and has sent shockwaves through American music ever since. Country Rock, as played by the Byrds, the Eagles and Gram Parsons, was to become the dominant style in American music during the 1970s.
A musical genre forever outside the lines With a claim on artists from Jimmie Rodgers to Jason Isbell, Americana can be hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. John Milward’s Americanaland is filled with the enduring performers and vivid stories that are at the heart of Americana. At base a hybrid of rock and country, Americana is also infused with folk, blues, R&B, bluegrass, and other types of roots music. Performers like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Gram Parsons used these ingredients to create influential music that took well-established genres down exciting new roads. The name Americana was coined in the 1990s to describe similarly inclined artists like Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Wilco. Today, Brandi Carlile and I’m With Her are among the musicians carrying the genre into the twenty-first century. Essential and engaging, Americanaland chronicles the evolution and resonance of this ever-changing amalgam of American music. Margie Greve’s hand-embroidered color portraits offer a portfolio of the pioneers and contemporary practitioners of Americana.
Popular culture is a central part of everyday life to many Americans. Personalities such as Elvis Presley, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan are more recognizable to many people than are most elected officials. With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States, covering everything from the penny press to Playboy, the NBA to NASCAR, big band to hip hop, and other topics including film, comics, television, sports, dance, and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race, gender, class, technology, economics, and politics, LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms American culture, revealing that the world of entertainment constantly evolves as it tries to meet the demands of a diverse audience. Trends in popular entertainment often reveal the tensions between competing ideologies, appetites, and values in American society. For example, in the late nineteenth century, Americans embraced "self-made men" such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie: the celebrities of the day were circus tycoons P.T. Barnum and James A. Bailey, Wild West star "Buffalo Bill" Cody, professional baseball organizer Albert Spalding, and prizefighter John L. Sullivan. At the same time, however, several female performers challenged traditional notions of weak, frail Victorian women. Adah Isaacs Menken astonished crowds by wearing tights that made her appear nude while performing dangerous stunts on horseback, and the shows of the voluptuous burlesque group British Blondes often centered on provocative images of female sexual power and dominance. Ashby describes how history and politics frequently influence mainstream entertainment. When Native Americans, blacks, and other non-whites appeared in the nineteenth-century circuses and Wild West shows, it was often to perpetuate demeaning racial stereotypes—crowds jeered Sitting Bull at Cody's shows. By the early twentieth century, however, black minstrel acts reveled in racial tensions, reinforcing stereotypes while at the same time satirizing them and mocking racist attitudes before a predominantly white audience. Decades later, Red Foxx and Richard Pryor's profane comedy routines changed American entertainment. The raw ethnic material of Pryor's short-lived television show led to a series of African-American sitcoms in the 1980s that presented common American experiences—from family life to college life—with black casts. Mainstream entertainment has often co-opted and sanitized fringe amusements in an ongoing process of redefining the cultural center and its boundaries. Social control and respectability vied with the bold, erotic, sensational, and surprising, as entrepreneurs sought to manipulate the vagaries of the market, control shifting public appetites, and capitalize on campaigns to protect public morals. Rock 'n Roll was one such fringe culture; in the 1950s, Elvis blurred gender norms with his androgynous style and challenged conventions of public decency with his sexually-charged performances. By the end of the 1960s, Bob Dylan introduced the social consciousness of folk music into the rock scene, and The Beatles embraced hippie counter-culture. Don McLean's 1971 anthem "American Pie" served as an epitaph for rock's political core, which had been replaced by the spectacle of hard rock acts such as Kiss and Alice Cooper. While Rock 'n Roll did not lose its ability to shock, in less than three decades it became part of the established order that it had originally sought to challenge. With Amusement for All provides the context to what Americans have done for fun since 1830, showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships between social, political, economic, and cultural forces and the way in which the entertainment world has reflected, refracted, or reinforced the values those forces represent in America.
This heartwarming picture book reassures children that a parent’s love never lets go—based on the poignant lyrics of JJ Heller’s beloved lullaby “Hand to Hold.” “May the living light inside you be the compass as you go / May you always know you have my hand to hold.” With delightful illustrations and an engaging rhyme scheme, this book offers the promise of security and love every child’s heart longs to know. From skipping stones and counting stars to climbing trees and telling stories, every moment is wrapped snugly in the certain warmth of a parent’s presence and God’s blessing. With poignancy and joy, this bedtime read captures the unconditional love parents want their children to know but so often fail to express amid the chaos of daily life.
Popular Mechanics inspires, instructs and influences readers to help them master the modern world. Whether it’s practical DIY home-improvement tips, gadgets and digital technology, information on the newest cars or the latest breakthroughs in science -- PM is the ultimate guide to our high-tech lifestyle.
“A terrific biography of a rock innovator that hums with juicy detail and wincing truth. . . . Page after page groans with the folly of the ’60s drug culture, the tragedy of talent toasted before its time, the curse of wealth and the madness of wasted opportunity.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE FIVE BEST ROCK BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ROLLING STONE As a singer and songwriter, Gram Parsons stood at the nexus of countless musical crossroads, and he sold his soul to the devil at every one. His intimates and collaborators included Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Fonda, Roger McGuinn, and Clarence White. Parsons led the Byrds to create the seminal country rock masterpiece Sweetheart of the Rodeo, helped to guide the Rolling Stones beyond the blues in their appreciation of American roots music, and found his musical soul mate in Emmylou Harris. Parsons’ solo albums, GP and Grievous Angel, are now recognized as visionary masterpieces of the transcendental jambalaya of rock, soul, country, gospel, and blues Parsons named “Cosmic American Music.” Parsons had everything—looks, charisma, money, style, the best drugs, the most heartbreaking voice—and threw it all away with both hands, dying of a drug and alcohol overdose at age twenty-six. In this beautifully written, raucous, meticulously researched biography, David N. Meyer gives Parsons’ mythic life its due. From interviews with hundreds of the famous and obscure who knew and worked closely with Parsons–many who have never spoken publicly about him before–Meyer conjures a dazzling panorama of the artist and his era. Praise for Twenty Thousand Roads “Far and away the most thorough biography of Parsons . . . skewers any number of myths surrounding this endlessly mythologized performer.”—Los Angeles Times “The definitive account of Gram Parsons’ life–and early death. From the country-rock pioneer’s wealthy, wildly dysfunctional family through his symbiotic friendship with Keith Richards, Meyer deftly illuminates one of rock’s most elusive figures.”—Rolling Stone “Meticulously researched . . . Though Meyer answers a lot of long-burning questions, he preserves Parsons’ legend as a man of mystery.”—Entertainment Weekly “Meyer gives Parsons a thorough, Peter Guralnick-like treatment.”—New York Post
