Country music in America has long marketed towards and embodied an eclectic blend of common folk: typically, southern, lower-class, God-fearing, hard-working, blue-collar white men, found in Appalachian homes and hollers scattered well beneath the Mason-Dixon line. From the earliest decades […]
Bluegrass music spent about four decades doing its best to try to establish a unique genre fully separated from country music. The origin came, as this column has often pointed out, on Dec. 8, 1945, with the addition of Earl […]
If there’s one song in the booze-soaked history of country music that tells it how it is, it’s Merle Haggard’s 1966 hit, “Bottle Let Me Down.” The song describes the tragic moment when the alcoholic bottoms out and admits the booze […]
Webb Pierce should have been in the Country Music Hall of Fame a decade before he died of pancreatic cancer in 1991. He didn’t get there until 2001. Shortly after he died, I began researching a story on his life. […]
