Forget the steroid-addled, overpaid, and unmotivated players: America's pastime is still alive and well, and is still the heartfelt sport it's always been--in the Minor Leagues. And nowhere is this truer than in Kentucky, whose rich baseball history continues to play out in the four teams profiled in this book. Following these teams through the 2010 season--the triumphs, struggles, and big league hopes and dreams--the book tells the larger story of baseball in America's smaller venues, where the game in its purest form is still valued and warmly embraced. The story begins before the season with.

The twentieth anniversary paperback edition, updated with a new preface Winner of the International Bluegrass Music Association Distinguished Achievement Award and of the Country Music People Critics' Choice Award for Favorite Country Book of the Year Beginning with the musical cultures of the American South in the 1920s and 1930s, Bluegrass: A History traces the genre through its pivotal developments during the era of Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys in the forties. It describes early bluegrass's role in postwar country music, its trials following the appearance of rock and roll, its embracing by the folk music revival, and the invention of bluegrass festivals in the mid_sixties. Neil V. Rosenberg details the transformation of this genre into a self-sustaining musical industry in the seventies and eighties is detailed and, in a supplementary preface written especially for this new edition, he surveys developments in the bluegrass world during the last twenty years. Featuring an amazingly extensive bibliography, discography, notes, and index, this book is one of the most complete and thoroughly researched books on bluegrass ever written.

Bluegrass music is an original characterization, simply called a 'representation, ' of traditional Appalachian music in its social form.

Documenting the history and development of bluegrass in and around the nation's capital since it emerged in the 1950s, Capital Bluegrass: Hillbilly Music Meets Washington, D.C. is central to our understanding of bluegrass in the United States and its place in our nation's capital.

The fruit of four decades of collaboration between bluegrass music’s premier photographer and premier historian, Bluegrass Odyssey is a satisfying and visually alluring journey into the heart of a truly American music. Combining more than two hundred of Carl Fleischhauer’s photographs with Neil V. Rosenberg’s expert commentary, this elegant visual documentary captures the music-making with the culture and community that foster it.

Propounding his "small ball theory" of sports literature, George Plimpton proposed that "the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature." Of course he had the relatively small baseball in mind, because its literature is formidable--vast and varied, instructive, often wildly entertaining, and occasionally brilliant. From this bewildering array of baseball books, Ron Kaplan has chosen 501 of the best, making it easier for fans to find just the books to suit them (or to know what they're missing). From biography, history, fiction, and instruction to books about ballparks, business, and rules, anyone who loves to read about baseball will find in this book a companionable guide, far more fun than a reference work has any right to be.

This text reader brings together the work of notable cultural geographers and folklife scholars to provide a clear and engaging overview of American folklife. Defining folklife as the traditional shared culture of familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, and regional groups, this anthology strikes a balance between material and nonmaterial culture. Carney has chosen essays that explore intangibles such as religion, music, and sports as well as physical traits such as food and architecture in a way that brings traditional culture to life. Visit our website for sample chapters!

A chronological guide to bluegrass music that describes and traces the development of the musical genre.

A shocking investigation into a true crime that tore a town apart—the violent murder of a young coed in Kentucky, the innocent boy who was jailed for the crime, and a small Southern community filled with haunting, unforgettable characters. Katie Autry was a foster child from a tiny village in Kentucky; a little awkward, but always with the biggest smile on her high school cheerleading squad. In September 2002, she matriculated as a freshman at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, majoring in the dental program. She worked days at the smoothie shop, nights at the local strip club, and fell in love with a football player who wouldn’t date her. On the morning of May 4, 2003, Katie Autry was raped, stabbed, sprayed with hairspray, and set on fire in her own dormitory room. In telling the true story of this shocking crime, William Van Meter describes the devastation of not one but three families. Two young men are jailed for the crime: DNA evidence places Stephen Soules, an unemployed, mixed-race high school dropout, at the scene; and Lucas Goodrum, a twenty-one-year-old pot dealer with an ex-wife, a girlfriend still in high school, and a history of domestic abuse, is held by an ever-changing confession. The friends of the suspects and the foster and birth families of the victim form complex and warring social nets that are cast across town. And a small southern community, populated by eccentrics of every socioeconomic class, from dirt-poor to millionaire, responds to the horror. With the keen eye of a talented young journalist returning to his southern roots, Van Meter paints a vivid portrait of the town, the characters who fill it, and the simmering class conflicts that made an injustice like this not only possible, but inevitable. Like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Bluegrass is redolent with atmosphere, dark tension, and lush landscapes.