Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost
Tony Russell, . . Oxford Univ., $29.95 (258pp) ISBN 978-0-19-532509-6
Long before Hank Williams, Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson, a passel of performers, mostly white men born in the South in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, loaded up old-time country music from its dirt road origins and hauled their songs into town in the new era of sound recording. They were an odd lot of farmers, mill workers, policemen, preachers, politicians, hell-raisers, cowboys and blind men, all dyed-in-the-wool characters who were the first to put what was initially called hillbilly music on vinyl. Take, for instance, A.C. “Eck” Robertson, born in 1887, who allegedly used a gourd with horse hair for strings as his first fiddle and went on to make what is believed to be the very first country music record in June 1922. Russell (
Reviewed on: 09/03/2007
Genre: Nonfiction
Paperback - 288 pages - 978-0-19-973266-1