Summer vacation. 1999. Fourteen-year-old Bandit finds herself alone and suffering in silence after a death in her family. Unable to cope with her grief-and forced to grow up quickly by neglectful parents-Bandit is in desperate need of a friend: Even if that friend is the neighborhood outcast, Allison Gale... a large-nosed girl with no sense of smell and a penchant for eating raw onions. The Ballad of Allison and Bandit tackles grief, growing up, and gaining a purpose. It's a darkly humorous drama about abandonment, isolation, mortality, friendship, and hope.

In this pathbreaking book, Allen Forte uses modern analytical procedures to explore the large repertoire of beautiful love songs written during the heyday of American musical theater, the Big Bands, and Tin Pan Alley. Covering the work of such songwriters as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen, he seeks to illuminate this extraordinary music indigenous to America by revealing its deeper organizational characteristics. In so doing, he aims to establish it as a unique corpus of music that deserves more intensive study and appreciation by scholars and connoisseurs in the broader fields of American popular music and jazz. Expressing much of the traditional tonality associated with European music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the love songs of the Golden Age are shown to draw on a rich variety of elements--popular harmony, idiomatic lyric-writing, and Afro-American dance rhythms. His analyses of such songs as "Embraceable You" or "Yesterdays" in particular exemplify his ability to convey the sublime, unpretentious simplicity of this great music.

The ancient ballads of England, Scotland and Ireland are great stories to visit but nobody in their right mind would want to live there. There s a high body count for every ballad and a happy ending usually involves boy meets girl and they end up sharing a grave. The musicians who go to retrieve the songs, with the help of the magic banjo, Lazarus, know this, but the fact is, the songs also contain a great deal of magic useful in defeating the devils who are out to dehumanize humanity by stealing the music. The Queen of the Fairies, aka the Debauchery Demon, Torchy Burns, makes them a deal they can t refuse and the reluctant heroes find themselves thrust into the lives and deaths of ballad people they know are going to end badly. It s enough to make a picker take up accounting!

He’s always loved her. Dixon Bell has loved Kate Bowdrey for as long as he can remember. Everybody in town knew him as the shy kid who carried around a guitar—and as the guy who disappeared after high school graduation. After thirteen years away—spent nursing a broken heart and becoming a successful songwriter—he’s discovered that Kate is available again, so he’s coming home to New Skye to make all his dreams come true. But L. T. LaRue—Kate’s soon-to-be ex-husband and one of the most powerful men in town—has other plans for Dixon. Dixon just happens to own a beautiful old plantation house, and L.T. wants to use that property for high-priced condos. And he wants Dixon to stay the hell away from Kate. But Dixon’s not selling—he has big plans for that house, plans that include Kate and her kids. And he’s certainly not giving up the woman he loves. Not again. Not without a fight.