Presents a history of country music in the United States, profiles the genre's most notable past and present stars, and features must-have song and album suggestions.

Young readers will learn that country songs tell stories about everyday life.

Since its first publication in 1968, Bill C. Malone's Country Music USA has won universal acclaim as the definitive history of American country music. Starting with the music's folk roots in the rural South, it traces country music from the early days of radio into the twenty-first century. In this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Malone, the featured historian in Ken Burns's 2019 documentary on country music, has revised every chapter to offer new information...

"Growing up poor in Mountain Pine, Arkansas, with a young, addicted mom, Bobby Estell fell in love with country music. Abandoned by his father at the age of five, Bobby saw the radio as his way out--a dream that came true in college when he went on air at the Henderson State University campus station broadcasting as Bobby Bones, while simultaneously starting The Bobby Bones Show at 105.9 KLAZ. Bobby's passions were pop, country music, and comedy,...

"In his first book of new writing since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Bob Dylan offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music through a series of essays that double as meditations and reflections on the human condition."--

"Country music emerged from 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. 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...

Ken Burns chronicles the history of a uniquely American art form, rising from the experiences of remarkable people in distinctive regions of the nation. From its roots in ballads, hymns, and the blues to its mainstream popularity, viewers will follow the evolution of country music over the course of the twentieth century as it eventually emerged to become America's music. Features never-before-seen footage and photographs, plus interviews with more...