(Book). Call it "Adult Contemporary." Call it "Middle of the Road." Call it "Easy Listening." The hard truth is, this is the definitive work on the softer side of pop music. Joel Whitburn's new Top Adult Contemporary 1961-2001 is an artist-by-artist listing of the nearly 8,000 singles and over 1,900 artists that appeared on Billboard 's "Easy Listening" and "Hot Adult Contemporary" singles charts from July 17, 1961 through December 29, 2001. Includes each song's essential chart data: peak chart position * chart debut date * total weeks charted * original label & number * total weeks at #1 or #2 * and biographical information for nearly every artist. This is a massive update of the previous edition, with dozens of new artists continuing a genre of music that never goes out of style. Bigger, better and more fact-packed than ever!

(Book). A comprehensive collection of one of today's hottest music formats. This book provides a 46-year history of Adult Contemporary (AC) music complete with over 8,500 songs, and 2,000 artists that appeared in Billboard's "Adult Contemporary" and "Adult Top 40" charts. This is the first time ever that a complete Adult Top 40 Chart history book has been published and it covers artists as diverse as Counting Crows, Sheryl Crow, Goo Goo Dolls, Lenny Kravitz, James Blunt, Kelly Clarkson, Jack Johnson and Daniel Powter. In the standard format that Record Research has made standard, all the essential song and artist info is included. Also, for the first time, songwriters are shown for every title. Many other bonus sections are added including lists of top artists organized by different themes and all-time rankings. Previous edition: Top Adult Contemporary, ISBN 089201497

(Book). In this comprehensive artist-by-artist listing, you'll find the more than 2,300 artists and 17,800 songs that debuted on Billboard's country singles charts from 1944-2005. Not only does it cover the complete chart careers of legendary country greats such as Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, Merle Haggard, Alan Jackson, and Reba McEntire, it also introduces fresh country voices like Gretchen Wilson, Bobby Pinson, Keith Anderson and others. This unique country compilation is a priceless gold mine of stats and facts, all presented in a handy, easy-to-use format!

The all-embracing, "whaddya got?" nature of rebellion in Fifties America included pop music's unlikely challenge to entrenched notions of masculinity. Within that upheaval, four prominent artists dared to behave in ways that let the public assume—but not see—their queerness. That these artists cultivated ambiguous sexual personas often reflected an understandable fear, but also a struggle to fulfill personal and professional expectations.Vincent L. Stephens confronts notions of the closet—both coming out and staying in—by analyzing the careers of Liberace, Johnny Mathis, Johnnie Ray, and Little Richard. Appealing to audiences hungry for novelty and exoticism, the four pop icons used performance and queering techniques that ran the gamut. Liberace's flamboyance shared a spectrum with Mathis's intimate sensitivity while Ray's overwrought displays as "Mr. Emotion" seemed worlds apart from Little Richard's raise-the-roof joyousness. As Stephens shows, the quartet not only thrived in an era of gray flannel manhood, they pioneered the ways generations of later musicians would consciously adopt sexual mystery as an appealing and proven route to success.