Live Fast Love Hard

As one of the best-known honky tonkers to appear in the wake of Hank Williams’s death, Faron Young was a popular presence on Nashville’s music scene for more than four decades. The Singing Sheriff produced a string of Top Ten hits, placed over eighty songs on the country music charts, and founded the long-running country music periodical Music City News in 1963. Flamboyant, impulsive, and generous, he helped and encouraged a new generation of talented songwriter-performers that included Willie Nelson and Bill Anderson. In 2000, four years after his untimely death, Faron was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Presenting the first detailed portrayal of this lively and unpredictable country music star, Diane Diekman masterfully draws on extensive interviews with Young’s family, band members, and colleagues. Impeccably researched, Diekman’s narrative also weaves anecdotes from Louisiana Hayride and other old radio shows with ones from Young’s business associates, including Ralph Emery. Her unique insider’s look into Young’s career adds to an understanding of the burgeoning country music entertainment industry during the key years from 1950 to 1980, when the music expanded beyond its original rural roots and blossomed into a national (ultimately, international) enterprise. Echoing Young’s characteristic ability to entertain and surprise fans, Diekman combines an account of his public career with a revealing, intimate portrait of his personal life.

Country music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn't just happen. This readable history reveals how country music's Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling the music to servicemembers. Beginning in the 1950s, the military flooded armed forces airwaves with the music, hosted tour dates at bases around the world, and drew on artists from Johnny Cash to Lee Greenwood to support recruitment programs. Over the last half of the twentieth century, the close connections between the Defense Department and Music Row gave an economic boost to the white-dominated sounds of country while marginalizing Black artists and fueling divisions over the meaning of patriotism. This story is filled with familiar stars like Roy Acuff, Elvis Presley, and George Strait, as well as lesser-known figures: industry executives who worked the halls of Congress, country artists who dissented from the stereotypically patriotic trappings of the genre, and more. Joseph M. Thompson argues convincingly that the relationship between Music Row and the Pentagon helped shape not only the evolution of popular music but also race relations, partisanship, and images of the United States abroad.

The years from about 1950 to 1970 were the golden age of twang. Country music's giants all strode the earth in those years: Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, George Jones and Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. And many of the standards that still define country were recorded then: "Folsom Prison Blues," "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Mama Tried," "Stand by Your Man," and "Coal Miner's Daughter." In Sing Me Back Home, Dana Jennings pushes past the iconic voices and images to get at what classic country music truly means to us today. Yes, country tells the story of rural America in the twentieth century—but the obsessions of classic country were obsessions of America as a whole: drinking and cheating, class and the yearning for home, God and death. Jennings, who grew up in a town that had more cows than people when he was born, knows all of this firsthand. His people lived their lives by country music. His grandmothers were honky-tonk angels, his uncles men of constant sorrow, and his father a romping, stomping hell-raiser who lived for the music of Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the other rockabilly hellions. Sing Me Back Home is about a vanished world in which the Depression never ended and the sixties never arrived. Jennings uses classic country songs to explain the lives of his people, and shows us how their lives are also ours—only twangier.

The Little Black Songbook returns with the ultimate collection of Country hits from the all-time masters. Presented in chord songbook format, this collection features Guitar chords, diagrams and complete lyrics. Ideal for strumming and singing, this collection places some of the most popular and well-respected country artists at your disposal, including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, Glen Campbell, Hank Williams and many more! Perfect for any aspiring guitarist, these tunes are ideal for a group singalongs, a spot of busking or, using the Spotify playlist included within the book, simply to explore the rich history of the world's best country music. Included within this little book are: - Always On My Mind (Willie Nelson) - Big River (Johnny Cash) - Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain (Willie Nelson) - Blue Moon Of Kentucky (Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys) - By The Time I Get To Phoenix (Glen Campbell) - Can The Circle Be Unbroken (The Carter Family) - Coal Miner's Daughter (Loretta Lynn) - El Paso (Marty Robbins) - Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash) - Gentle On My Mind (Glen Campbell) - I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow (The Soggy Bottom Boys) - I Just Wanna Love You (The Shires) - I'm Movin' On (Hank Snow) - Islands In The Stream (Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton) - Jolene (Dolly Parton) - Lonesome Whistle (Hank Williams) - Long Black Veil (Lefty Fritzell) - Pancho And Lefty (Townes Van Zandt) - Portland, Oregon (Loretta Lynn & Jack White) - A Satisfied Mind (Porter Wagoner) - Sea Of Heartbreak (Don Gibson) - Sin City (The Flying Burrito Brothers) - Sixteen Tons (Tennessee Ernie Ford) - Stand By Your Man (Tammy Wynette) - Take Me Home, Country Roads (John Denver) - The Tennessee Waltz (Patti Page) - That Silver-Haired Daddy Of Mine (Gene Autry) - There's Your Trouble (Dixie Chicks) - Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You (Bob Dylan) - Wabash Cannonball (Roy Acuff) - Whiskey Lullaby (Brad Paisley feat. Alison Krauss) - Wichita Lineman (Glen Campbell) - Wildwood Flower (The Carter Family) - You Are My Sunshine (Norman Blake) ... And many more!

*A NEW YORK TIMES HUMOR BESTSELLER* By the author of I Like You Just the Way I Am and a frequent Chelsea contributor, an outrageous collection of personal stories about motherhood, responsibility, and other potential disasters. Jenny Mollen is a writer and actress living in New York. Until recently, her life was exciting, sexy, a little eccentric, and one hundred percent impulsive. She had a husband who embraced her crazy—who understood her need to occasionally stalk around the house in his ex-girlfriend’s old beach caftans and to invite their drug dealer to Passover seder (so he wouldn’t feel like they were using him only for drugs). Then they had their son, Sid, and overnight, Jenny was forced to grow up: to be responsible, to brush her hair, to listen to her voicemail. Searingly funny and surprisingly affecting, Live Fast Die Hot is a collection of stories about what happens when you realize that some things are more important than crafting the perfect tweet—and a reminder that even if you never thought you were cut out for parenting, at least you can be better at it than your mother.

 The music today known as "classic country" originated in the South in the 1920s. Influenced by blues and folk music, instrumentation was typically guitar, fiddle, bass, steel guitar, and later drums, with lyrics and arrangements rooted in tradition. This book covers some of the genre's legendary artists, from its heyday in the 1940s to its decline in the early 1970s. Revivalists keeping the traditions alive in the 21st century are also explored. Drawing on original interviews with artists and their associates, biographical profiles chronicle their lives on the road and in the studio, as well as the stories behind popular songs. Thirty-six performers are profiled, including Ernest Tubb, Ray Price, Loretta Lynn, Bill Anderson, Faron Young, Mickey Gilley, Freddie Hart, Jerry Reed, Charley Pride, David Frizzell, The Cactus Blossoms, The Secret Sisters, and Pokey LaFarge.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. By what miracle can an assortment of seemingly unrelated particles come together and correctly assemble to form a human being? Amazingly, once aggregated, these atoms, molecules, and compounds manage to interact reasonably coherently during our lives but seek to return to their dusty state when death occurs. Of the billions of our species who have existed on earth over the millennia, most have quietly and inexorably returned to ashes and dust when their term of life expired. This book tracks some of the misadventures of selected corpses, including burials that went awry to body snatching, exhumations, human-relic collection, and assorted desecrations. Over the years, it seems that a remarkable number of bodies have failed to enjoy the admonition to “Rest in Peace.” Whether these aberrations in the burial process have disturbed the afterlife of the departed, everyone is dying to discover the answer.