With country music as popular as ever-what other form of music has been honored on an official state quarter?-Country Music's Most WantedOao hits the stage to bring you tales of country musicOCOs famous and infamous.Alan Jackson delivered mail to Hee Hawbefore he made it big. Garth Brooks was booed off the stage during an eleventh-grade talent show. Kris Kristofferson landed a borrowed helicopter on Johnny CashOCOs lawn so he could pitch Cash a song. YouOCOll read about Vernon Dalhart, Kenny Chesney, Hank Williams, the Dixie Chicks, Tim McGraw, the Carters, the Cashes, the Webbs, and so many more artists of yesterday and today. With more than fifty lists, Country Music's Most WantedOao gives you those stories and people plus fun discussions of the best train songs, phone call songs, humorous songs, and tequila songs (you provide the salt and limes).Country musicOCOs vibrant past, successful present, and bright future are all represented in this humorous look at the stars and legends of Music City. From the first million-selling record in 1924 to the songs you heard on the radio last night, Country Music's Most WantedOao has a tractor-full of fun country music trivia!"

One of Oprah Daily's 20 Favorite Books of 2021 • Selected as one of Pitchfork's Best Music Books of the Year “One of the best books of its kind in decades.” —The Wall Street Journal An epic achievement and a huge delight, the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years refracted through the big genres that have defined and dominated it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music—as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities. He explains the history of slow jams, the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in trouble. Sanneh shows how these genres have been defined by the tension between mainstream and outsider, between authenticity and phoniness, between good and bad, right and wrong. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there have always been Black audiences and white audiences, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there has been Black music and white music, constantly mixing and separating. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn’t transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full.

Introduction: Dolly mythology -- "Backwoods Barbie": Dolly Parton's gender performance -- My Tennessee mountain home: early Parton and authenticity narratives -- Parton's crossover and film stardom: the "hillbilly Mae West"--Hungry again: reclaiming country authenticity narratives -- "Digital Dolly" and new media fandoms -- Conclusion: brand evolution and Dollywood

In country music, the men might dominate the radio waves. But it’s women—like Maren Morris, Mickey Guyton, and Kacey Musgraves—who are making history. This is the full and unbridled story of the past twenty years of country music seen through the lens of these trailblazers’ careers—their paths to stardom and their battles against a deeply embedded boys’ club, as well as their efforts to transform the genre into a more inclusive place—as told by award-winning Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss. For the women of country music, 1999 was an entirely different universe—a brief blip in time, when women like Shania Twain and the Chicks topped every chart and made country music a woman’s world. But the industry, which prefers its stars to be neutral, be obedient, and never rock the boat, had other plans. It wanted its women to “shut up and sing”—or else. In 2021, women are played on country radio as little as 10 percent of the time, but they’re still selling out arenas, as Kacey Musgraves does, and becoming infinitely bigger live draws than most of their male counterparts, creating massive pop crossover hits like Maren Morris’s “The Middle,” pushing the industry to confront its racial biases with Mickey Guyton’s “Black Like Me,” and winning heaps of Grammy nominations. Her Country is the story of how in the past two decades, country’s women fought back against systems designed to keep them down and created entirely new pathways to success. It’s the behind-the-scenes story of how women like Kacey, Mickey, Maren, Miranda Lambert, Rissi Palmer, Brandi Carlile, and many more have reinvented their place in an industry stacked against them. When the rules stopped working for these women, they threw them out, made their own, and took control—changing the genre forever, and for the better.