This book is the account of the author's eight and a half years of prosecuting for the State of Alabama. The reader will meet the prosecutors, (the "white hats) the defense attorney's, (the black hats) as well as the cops, the detectives and the bad men and blood spillers that plague our society. The book is not bereft of humor, with the reader being introduced to the court hangers on who are present in various incarnations in every jurisdiction in the country. The authour recounts some of the many cases that he tried and a few that were tried by other prosecutors. It is a fascinating account of people at their best and at their very worst. All in all, it is a terrific read that is absolutely true but reads like the best of crime fiction.
When Southern rock acts like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynrd stormed American concert stages, detractors immediately came to the fore declaring the genre to be little more than a marketing gimmick. But those on stage themselves would have called its appearance not only inevitable but also a way of life. In the end, the musicians who played Southern rock reflected a robust and broad variety of influences, drawing deeply from the wellsprings of blues, rock, country, and even jazz. Listeners gravitated to the sounds of the New South, a place that had captured pop culture’s imagination amid the turbulence following President Nixon’s successful Southern strategy and silent majorities. Southern rock garnered a second wave of enthusiasm with the rise of the urban cowboy and Bill Clinton’s ascension to the presidency. For nearly half a century, Southern rock has captured and expressed the energy of the New South, inspiring a legacy that listeners can still hear from jam bands, indie acts, and mainstream country musicians. In Counting Down Southern Rock: The 100 Best Songs, C. Eric Banister considers the best songs to emerge from the bands who made Southern rock what it is. Banister examines the impact of the songs on the society and culture of devoted fans and delves deep into the history and production of each song. Featuring such well-known bands as the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd as well as less visible groups like Blackhorse and Heartsfield, this book is the perfect introduction for both newbies and dedicated fans.
(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Songbook). More than 40 of the greatest tell-it-like-it-is country hits! Includes: Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way * Big River * Bloody Mary Morning * A Boy Named Sue * Cocaine Blues * Folsom Prison Blues * Honky Tonk Heroes * I'm Not Lisa * Ladies Love Outlaws * On the Road Again * (I'm a) Ramblin' Man * Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down * Whiskey River * and more.
What would it be like to be a part of country music history? Singer/sngwriter and manager Merle Kilgore could have told you. He awed his fans with tales of his life in the music business, always with a supporting cast of impossibly famous friends. At age fourteen Merle carried the guitar for Hank Williams Sr. Four years later he wrote his first song, and Webb Pierce turned it into a million-seller. He double-dated with Elvis Presley, wrecked hotel rooms with Johnny Cash, held seances with Johnny Horton, and convinced Audrey Williams to put Hank Jr. on the road at fourteen-years-old. Merle became a prolific songwriter, entering the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He co-wrote his signature accomplishment, Ring of Fire with June Carter Cash. This work is listed by CMT as one of the top four all-time country music songs. These are just a few of the amazing stories of Merle's life, showcased in These Are My People, written by his grandson Mark Rickert.
Quinn Colson returns to Jericho, Mississippi, and gets pulled back into a world of greed and violence in this gritty, darkly comic tale from New York Times bestselling Southern crime master Ace Atkins. After being voted out of office and returning to the war zone he’d left behind, Quinn Colson is back in Jericho, trying to fix things with his still-married high school girlfriend and retired Hollywood stuntman father. Quinn knows he doesn't owe his hometown a damn thing, but he can't resist the pull of becoming a lawman again and accepts a badge from his former colleague, foul-mouthed acting Sheriff Lillie Virgil. Both officers have fought corruption in Tibbehah County before, but the case they must confront now is nothing like they've ever seen... When a former high school cheerleader is found walking a back road completely engulfed in flames, everyone in Jericho wants answers for the senseless act of violence. As Quinn and Lillie uncover old secrets and new lies, the entire town turns against them, and they soon learn that the most dangerous enemies may be the ones you trust most.
The New York Times-bestselling final book by the beloved, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz. With Spying on the South, the best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America's greatest landscape architect. In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times. For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name "Yeoman," the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners were revelatory for readers of his day, and Yeoman's remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted's career as America's first and foremost landscape architect. Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted's tracks and often his mode of transport (including muleback): through Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz's intrepid and often hilarious journey through an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic.
Music informatics is an interdisciplinary research area that encompasses data driven approaches to the analysis, generation, and retrieval of music. In the era of big data, two goals weigh heavily on many research agendas in this area: (a) the identification of better features and (b) the acquisition of better training data. To this end, researchers have started to incorporate findings and methods from music cognition, a related but historically distinct research area that is concerned with elucidating the underlying mental processes involved in music-related behavior.
In the 1980s, Manitoba country-rock group The C-Weed Band scored a half dozen Top Ten hits on the country music charts beginning with their #1 hit single "Evangeline". As an Indigenous band, they broke ground for other Indigenous artists on the Canadian music mainstream. Starting out in the tough Main Street Winnipeg bars, the band faced daunting odds including poverty, discrimination, and racism throughout their rise to success. The members of The C-Weed Band, whose nucleus was the three Ranville brothers - Errol, Wally and Don - from rural Eddystone MB prevailed, earning the admiration of a legion of dedicated fans and respect from fellow musicians not only across Canada but in the United States, Europe and China where the band toured to great acclaim. This is their story, told by the members of the band themselves as well as associates, contemporaries, and friends. It's been a long, strange trip but The C-Weed Band triumphed and are still performing to adoring crowds everywhere.
NOTICE: The intoxicated human brain is a fortress breached by the keepers of hell. Enter the addiction: Any number of physical manifestations drawn from the effects of Satanic influence over the addicted soul. The Residual Effects of Unintended Consequence is a candid memoir listing slightly toward darkness as the addiction debuts early and vies all for leading role. Manifest here is a graphic documentation of warfare as conducted on a spiritual plane for the possession of our minds. Fortunately, the spiritual elements of human emotion abound as the seasons. While it is true that the addiction tends to vie all for stardom in every show that pertains, it does not always prevail. For of the greatest contenders there is, there's love. Would it then reason that where there is only the touting of love, which is greater than the actual, then the addiction reins? A question then remains. Is it a story of love after all?
This is the first study of "hard" country music as well as the first comprehensive application of contemporary cultural theory to country music. Barbara Ching begins by defining the features that make certain country songs and artists "hard." She compares hard country music to "high" American culture, arguing that hard country deliberately focuses on its low position in the American cultural hierarchy, comically singing of failures to live up to American standards of affluence, while mainstream country music focuses on nostalgia, romance, and patriotism of regular folk. With chapters on Hank Williams Sr. and Jr., Merle Haggard, George Jones, David Allan Coe, Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam, and the Outlaw Movement, this book is written in a jargon-free, engaging style that will interest both academic as well as general readers.
