With music today available on YouTube, online and satellite radio, MTV, through digital downloads, and on iPods and other handheld devices, we may think that we have heard all there is to hear about modern artists. The stories behind the songs that keep us humming are less often explored. Readers will learn how some of the most popular musicians today—entertainers such as Madonna, Adele, Kanye West, and Taylor Swift—rose to fame and made important musical breakthroughs, all while paying tribute to those who came before them.

In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes. Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers’ albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band’s members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author’s hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers’ complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don’t Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it’s a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.

The Most Trusted Guide to Songwriting Success For 35 years, Songwriter’s Market has provided the most complete and up-to-date information songwriters need to place their songs with music publishers, record companies, record producers, managers, booking agents, music firms and more. In the 2012 edition you also gain access to: • Hundreds of songwriting placement opportunities • Power-packed articles on taking charge of your career—including how to navigate the constantly evolving world of social media and discover alternative routes to songwriting success • Listings for songwriting organizations, conferences, workshops, retreats, colonies, contests, and venues (a brand new addition to the listings; a helpful tool for indie artists booking their own tours) Take charge of your songwriting career today with the 2012 Songwriter’s Market. Includes an exclusive 60-minute FREE WEBINAR with music licensing expert Sarah Gavigan that will teach you how to find new placements for your music "Songwriter’s Market is a valuable resource for songwriters, especially those living away from traditional music centers. It’s stuffed full of useful information." —Pat Pattison, author of Songwriting Without Boundaries and Writing Better Lyrics "Learn how to create buzz as an artist. This is an excellent resource to determine the kind of entrance you want to make into the world of singer-songwriters." —Amy Stroup, indie artist, The Other Side of Love Sessions

In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America’s most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics. In Hubbs’s view, the popular phrase "I’ll listen to anything but country" allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive "omnivore" musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class. With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country’s manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible. Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

An honest, illustrated, detailed guide to the quintessential American city. Full coverage of all the neighbourhoods, including the downtown Loop and its prominent skyline, and ethnic enclaves like Greektown and Pilsen, plu ssighs from the Art Institute of Chicago to the shops on Michigan Avenue and all the Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Oak Park. Listings of restaurants, nightlife and accomodation cater for all budgets and include places to hear the Chicago Blues and engage in local pastimes such as rooting for the doomed Cubs baseball team. Tours and excursions to the North Shore are also listed.

Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists is more popular than racism! Hip hop is huge, and it's time someone wrote it all down. And got it all right. With over 25 aggregate years of interviews, and virtually every hip hop single, remix and album ever recorded at their disposal, the highly respected Ego Trip staff are the ones to do it. The Book of Rap Lists runs the gamut of hip hop information. This is an exhaustive, indispensable and completely irreverent bible of true hip hip knowledge.

(Music Pro Guide Books & DVDs). In order to achieve success in today's music industry, artists must first do a great deal of work on their own. Learning the required skills can take years of real-life experience, and hiring personal coaches, studio professionals, and consultants can be costly. But now, for the first time, there's an invaluable resource to help you meet these challenges. Five Star Music Makeover is an engaging all-in-one guide designed specifically for aspiring artists. Written by five experts with over 100 years of collective experience, both on and off the stage, this unique book covers five key skills every musician needs to succeed: (1) improving vocal production/technique; (2) writing memorable and marketable songs; (3) recording your ultimate EP; (4) navigating the publishing world; and (5) promoting music effectively. Also included are insiders' stories and anecdotes, helpful tips, creative exercises, celebrity interviews, and all the practical expertise necessary to develop a successful music career. Five Star Music Makeover is a complete and practical career guide a resource that transforms artists from good to great.

In Making Value, Timothy D. Taylor examines how people’s conceptions of value inform and shape their production and consumption of music. Drawing on anthropological value theory, Taylor theorizes music’s economic and noneconomic forms of value both ethnographically and historically. He covers the creation and exchange of value in a wide range of contexts: indie rock scenes, an Irish traditional music session, the work of music managers, how supply chains function to create various forms of value, how trendspotters seek out and create value, and how musical performances act as media of value. Taylor shows that to focus on value is to attend to what is meaningful to people as they move through their worlds. Ultimately, Taylor demonstrates that theorizing value aids us in moving beyond the music itself toward understanding how musicians, workers in the music business, and audiences struggle to make and maintain what they value.

Reviews and rates the best recordings of country artists and groups, provides biographies of the artists, and charts the evolution of country music

Now in its sixth decade, country music studies is a thriving field of inquiry involving scholars working in the fields of American history, folklore, sociology, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and geography, among many others. Covering issues of historiography and practice as well as the ways in which the genre interacts with media and social concerns such as class, gender, and sexuality, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music interrogates prevailing narratives, explores significant lacunae in the current literature, and provides guidance for future research. More than simply treating issues that have emerged within this subfield, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music works to connect to broader discourses within the various fields that inform country music studies in an effort to strengthen the area's interdisciplinarity. Drawing upon the expertise of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook presents an introduction into the historiographical narratives and methodological issues that have emerged in country music studies' first half-century.