Sing Me Back Home

He was born a poor Okie boy, grew up in poverty in a boxcar in Bakersfield, California, then moved on to serve a prison sentence in San Quintin. Only then did he become the most popular country music singer-songwriter in the nation. It is the poor-boy-made-good, Merle Haggard, who gives us Sing Me Back Home - his beautiful, funny, searching and intensely honest autobiography.

For over fifty years, Bill C. Malone has researched and written about the history of country music. Today he is celebrated as the foremost authority on this distinctly American genre. This new collection brings together his significant article-length work from a variety of sources, including essays, book chapters, and record liner notes. Sing Me Back Home distills a lifetime of thinking about country and southern roots music. Malone offers the heartfelt story of his own working-class upbringing in rural East Texas, recounting how in 1939 his family’s first radio, a battery-powered Philco, introduced him to hillbilly music and how, years later, he went on to become a scholar in the field before the field formally existed. Drawing on a hundred years of southern roots music history, Malone assesses the contributions of artists such as William S. Hays, Albert Brumley, Joe Thompson, Jimmie Rodgers, Johnny Gimble, and Elvis Presley. He also explores the intricate relationships between black and white music styles, gospel and secular traditions, and pop, folk, and country music. Author of many books, Malone is best known for his pioneering volume County Music, U.S.A., published in 1968. It ranks as the first comprehensive history of American country music and remains a standard reference. This compilation of Malone’s shorter—and more personal—essays is the perfect complement to his earlier writing and a compelling introduction to the life’s work of America’s most respected country music historian.

"Lush and lavish, Sing Me Forgotten hit all the right notes." —Erin A. Craig, New York Times bestselling author of House of Salt and Sorrow "A deliciously magical feminist twist on the beloved classic The Phantom of the Opera." —Kester Grant, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Court of Miracles Isda does not exist. At least not beyond the opulent walls of the opera house. Cast into a well at birth for being one of the magical few who can manipulate memories when people sing, she was saved by Cyril, the opera house’s owner. Since that day, he has given her sanctuary from the murderous world outside. All he asks in return is that she use her power to keep ticket sales high—and that she stay out of sight. For if anyone discovers she survived, Isda and Cyril would pay with their lives. But Isda breaks Cyril’s cardinal rule when she meets Emeric Rodin, a charming boy who throws her quiet, solitary life out of balance. His voice is unlike any she’s ever heard, but the real shock comes when she finds in his memories hints of a way to finally break free of her gilded prison. Haunted by this possibility, Isda spends more and more time with Emeric, searching for answers in his music and his past. But the price of freedom is steeper than Isda could ever know. For even as she struggles with her growing feelings for Emeric, she learns that in order to take charge of her own destiny, she must become the monster the world tried to drown in the first place. "Enchanting, lush, and decadent." —Adalyn Grace, author of All the Stars and Teeth Also by Jessica S. Olson: A Forgery of Roses

Ten years of infertility issues culminate in the destruction of music therapist Zoe Baxter's marriage, after which she falls in love with another woman, Vanessa, and wants to start a family; but her ex-husband, Max, in the grips of an anti-gay pastor, stands in the way. Includes a CD of songs created for the novel. (This title is being re-listed in Forecast). 1.5 million first printing.

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.

In this riveting personal story, award-winning, bestselling country music recording artist Merle Haggard takes you on a tour through his house of memories, offering a fascinating look inside his turbulent yet successful life. Merle reveals the true stories about his birth and troubled upbringing in a converted railroad boxcar. He recalls the loss of his father when he was nine, after which his childhood disobedience transformed into full-blown delinquency that eventually landed him behind the cold walls of San Quentin. He gives tribute to his mother and relives the painful memory of her death. He shares the lessons he learned from a life shaped by violence, gambling, and drugs, never shying away from the fact that he continues to pay for decades of reckless living. And he talks about the music he loves—how, ultimately, it has defined the man he is.