By Cleve Francis Cleve Francis is a famous country singer you may have never heard of. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Growing up in the Jim Crow South in Jennings, Louisiana, he faced discrimination at every turn. The town’s Carnegie library, the oldest established library in the state, stood as a bulwark […]
By Rob Miller The title of Rob Miller’s newly released memoir, The Hours Are Long But the Pay Is Low, caught my attention and made me want to read the book. It tells the story of Bloodshot Records, a recording company Miller cofounded in Chicago in 1993. “For decades,” he writes, “music has grabbed me […]
By the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum staff Dolly Parton: Journey of a Seeker is the title of an extensive exhibition that opened May 20, 2025, at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. It is also the title of this companion book, which was created by the staff […]
By Steve Dorff While researching the life of U.S. Navy sailor Calvin Graham, who served on the battleship USS South Dakota in 1942 when he was twelve years old, I was surprised to learn Steve Dorff had composed the music for Calvin’s 1988 made-for-TV movie, Too Young the Hero. I knew Steve was a songwriter […]
By Bobbie Malone and Bill C. Malone A newly released biography on the western singing group Riders in the Sky tells the story of its original members still going strong after almost fifty years. Known as “America’s favorite cowboy musicians” and “the most educated band in country music,” the band members are: Ranger Doug Green, […]
By Shania Twain After reading Shania Twain: From This Moment On, I am filled with admiration for Shania and all she has overcome in life. I’m also impressed that she wrote her 2011 autobiography herself. She says it began as an exercise to deal with the trauma of the extreme betrayal by her husband and […]
By Douglas B. Green Gene Autry. Roy Rogers. Tex Ritter. These are the three most famous singing cowboys from the western movies of the 1930s-1950s. But there were hundreds more. Most of them are documented in Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy, an exhaustive research project by music historian Douglas Green, […]
By Geoffrey Himes Geoffrey Himes looked back at the history of modern country music to define a movement that took place between 1968 and 1985, beginning in Los Angeles and moving to Nashville. Its musicians wanted to change and update traditional country music through songwriting and performances that resonated with young baby boomers. Himes describes […]
By Don Reid Can you picture Don Reid of the Statler Brothers “sitting in a dark room alone, in front of a computer screen for hours and days at a time, creating people and making up stories”? That’s how he describes writing his latest novel, Among the Ashes. In the Acknowledgments section of the book, […]
By Margaret Jones Possibly the most thorough Patsy Cline biography (I have three of them) came from Margaret Jones in 1994. I own the 1999 softcover edition of Patsy: The Life and Times of Patsy Cline. Faron Young was one of the interview sources, and I corresponded briefly with Jones while I was working on Faron’s […]