MAN OF THE DECADE – Forty Years Ago Three months after his triple-bypass heart surgery, Marty Robbins attended the fifth annual Academy of Country and Western Music awards banquet, held at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on April 13, 1970. There he received the ACM’s first “Man of the Decade” trophy, for the decade […]
By Mark Mills By the spring of 1942, the tiny island of Malta, located south of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea, is the most bombed patch of ground in the world. Pounded incessantly by German and Italian warplanes, the Maltese are losing confidence in the power of Great Britain to protect its colony. Loyalists who […]
This periodic newsletter commemorates the lives of Faron Young and Marty Robbins. Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story was published in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press, and the publication goal for Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins is 2012. Thanks to Gary Presley for reviewing the manuscript; I’m now cutting words […]
FIRST RECORDING SESSIONS FOR FARON YOUNG AND MARTY ROBBINS Faron Young’s first Capitol recording session took place at the Castle Studio in Nashville’s Tulane Hotel on March 1, 1952. Faron hadn’t yet moved from Shreveport to Nashville. Sidemen included Floyd Cramer on piano and Jimmy Day on steel guitar, with Ken Nelson as producer. “Have […]
FARON YOUNG’S BIRTHPLACE Faron was born in a little two-bedroom rental house on Hoadley Street in Shreveport, Louisiana, on February 25, 1932. The family soon moved around the corner to Seymour Street. Here’s a photo of the corner of Seymour and Hoadley today. The pole is in the location where Faron’s house stood. Well, I […]
This periodic newsletter commemorates the lives of Faron Young and Marty Robbins. Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story was published in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press, and the publication goal for Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins is 2012. Today I completed the first draft of Marty’s biography–30 chapters. I’ll take […]
By Rosanne Cash Rosanne Cash is the eldest of four daughters of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto. She was born to the impoverished young couple in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1955, one month before the release of her father’s first single, “Cry, Cry, Cry.” They moved to Los Angeles several years later, after […]
By Dara Horn It is Passover 1862 and Jacob Rappaport is in New Orleans to murder his uncle. Once unable to rebel against his father’s orders, he is now helpless to refuse the orders of his Army superiors. A 19-year-old who escaped from an arranged marriage and joined the Union Army, Jacob has been sent […]
By Jane Borodale When seventeen-year-old Agnes Trussel discovers she’s pregnant, she steals a neighbor’s gold coins and runs away to London. Her impoverished rural Sussex family can’t support another child, and she would be forced to marry the neighbor who raped her. With her possessions tied inside a piece of oilcloth, she sneaks away before […]
By James Guilford Kendry detests her prestigious high school and its bullies, her middle-class neighborhood in which her mother hides a drug addiction, and her “toilet bowl of a social life.” The 15-year-old white girl wants to live adventurously, like the black girls she admires from a distance when she rides the train to her […]