He and his co-producer Dayton Duncan have put equal care into this companion book.' 'Ken Burns' recent PBS opus charted the history of the music that put Nashville on the map. 'An elegant encapsulation of the material in the documentary, detailing country’s evolution and emergence as a musical form with broader reach and inclusion than many might think.'

Duncan’s lavishly illustrated book - in many ways the photos alone are worth the price of the book and tell a compelling story themselves - well fulfills its purpose as a companion to the PBS series, encouraging us to swim in the many streams that flow into the big river of country music.' 'It gives some of the deeper background on artists and on the places and songs that the film can’t fully provide.

Rife with endlessly fascinating anecdotes, the stories in this sweeping yet intimate history will captivate longtime country fans and introduce new listeners to an extraordinary body of music that lies at the very center of the American experience. Here too are interviews with the genre's biggest stars, including the likes of Merle Haggard to Garth Brooks to Rosanne Cash. Here is Hank Williams's tragic honky tonk life, Dolly Parton rising to fame from a dirt-poor childhood, and Loretta Lynn turning her experiences into songs that spoke to women everywhere. With the birth of radio in the 1920s, the songs moved from small towns, mountain hollers, and the wide-open West to become the music of an entire nation-a diverse range of sounds and styles from honky tonk to gospel to bluegrass to rockabilly, leading up through the decades to the music's massive commercial success today.īut above all, Country Music is the story of the musicians. This deeply researched and hugely entertaining history begins where country music itself emerged: the American South, where people sang to themselves and to their families at home and in church, and where they danced to fiddle tunes on Saturday nights. The rich and colorful story of America's most popular music and the singers and songwriters who captivated, entertained, and consoled listeners throughout the twentieth century-based on the upcoming eight-part film series to air on PBS in September 2019

Country music dayton duncan