For sixty years, Renfro Valley has highlighted some of the biggest and most influential names in country and folk music. The show began in the 1930s as a combination radio broadcast and stage performance, and today it has grown into an array of shows and headliner concerts featuring old-time country music, country gospel, modern country, bluegrass, and comedy acts. John Lair, the ambitious and deeply committed founder of Renfro Valley, was fascinated with the past. He created the Renfro Valley Barn Dance to give radio listeners the experience of an old-fashioned rural hoe-down. He resisted the encroachment of popular "cowboy songs" and kept the stage and the airwaves filled with authentic Kentucky mountain music. Lair's vision struck a chord with music fans: on some Saturday nights, more than ten thousand people arrived at Renfro Valley and performances went on all night to accommodate the audiences. Pete Stamper, a forty-seven year veteran of Renfro Valley, traces the show's history from its early radio days in Cincinnati and Chicago, through the glory years in the 1940s, the lean times in the 1960s when rock and roll seemed to take over the music scene, to its renewed popularity in the 1990s. Once known as "the valley where time stands still," Renfro Valley has updated its programming while maintaining the feel of the folk culture on which it was founded. Red Foley, the Coon Creek Girls, Slim Miller, Pee Wee King, Old Joe Clark, and a host of other musicians and performers helped shape the development of Renfro Valley. Stamper describes the role of the Valley in the commercial history of country music and highlights John Lair's invaluable contribution to country music as a talent scout, businessman, and collector of traditional music of the South.

This volume preserves the public papers and letters from the five-year period when Lawrence W. Wetherby was governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Relatively little of this material has been available heretofore to the general public. And its inaccessibility may explain why the Wetherby administration has yet to be fully appreciated even by historians and political scientists. The years 1950 through 1955 offered problems and opportunities that made being governor both a challenge and a joy. It was a period of economic growth fostered by the artificial stimulus of the Korean War, and sudden economic readjustment when the war ended, that resulted in financial problems for Kentucky's government. There was depression in the important coal industry that caused a mass exodus of people from eastern Kentucky. A brief drought impaired agricultural production. While President Harry Truman had been quite solicitous of the state's needs, the new Republican administration in Washington was less so. Yet, of a positive nature, there was an influx of tourists, a concerted effort to diversify the state's economic base through industrialization, and an attempt to mitigate a characteristic isolation both within and without through the construction of toll roads and rural highways. The papers in this volume reflect the thought of Kentucky's executive branch on all of these issues.

Women have been pivotal in the country music scene since its inception, as Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson make clear in The Women of Country Music. Their groundbreaking volume presents the best current scholarship and writing on female country musicians. Beginning with the 1920s career of teenage guitar picker Roba Stanley, the contributors go on to discuss Polly Jenkins and Her Musical Plowboys, 50s honky-tonker Rose Lee Maphis, superstar Faith Hill, the relationship between Emmylou Harris and poet Bronwen Wallace, the Louisiana Hayride's Margaret Lewis Warwick, and more.

Based on extensive archival research and oral history, Staging Tradition traces the parallel careers of the creators of the Renfro Valley Barn Dance and the National Folk Festival. Through their devotion to the staging of traditional culture, including folk, country, and bluegrass music, John Lair (1894-1985) and Sarah Gertrude Knott (1895-1984) became two of the mid-twentieth century's most notable producers. Lair and Knott's discovery of new developments in theater and entertainment during the 1920s led the pair to careers that kept each of them center stage. Inspired by programs such as WLS's Barn Dance and the success of early folk events, Lair promoted Kentucky musicians. Knott staged her own radically inclusive festival, which included Native and African American traditions and continues today as the National Folk Festival. Michael Ann Williams shows how Lair and Knott fed the public's fascination with the "art of the common man" and were in turn buffeted by cultural forces that developed around and beyond them.

"Listening to the Beat of the Bomb" UPK author Charles Wolfe discusses his work and his new book Country Music Goes to War in the NEW YORK TIMES. While Toby Keith suggests that Americans should unite in support of the president, the Dixie Chicks assert their right to criticize the current administration and its military pursuits. Country songs about war are nearly as old as the genre itself, and the first gold record in country music went to the 1942 war song "There's a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere" by Elton Britt. The essays in Country Music Goes to War demonstrate that country musicians' engagement with significant political and military issues is not strictly a twenty-first-century phenomenon. The contributors examine the output of country musicians responding to America's large-scale confrontation in recent history: World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the cold war, September 11, and both conflicts in the Persian Gulf. They address the ways in which country songs and artists have energized public discourse, captured hearts, and inspired millions of minds. Charles K. Wolfe, professor of English and folklore at Middle Tennessee State University, is the author of numerous books and articles on music. James E. Akenson, professor of curriculum and instruction at Tennessee Technological University, is the founder of the International Country Music Conference. Together they have edited the collections The Women of Country Music, Country Music Annual 2000, Country Music Annual 2001, and Country Music Annual 2002.