What else needs to be said about knots? Almost 650 pages of incredible knowledge, presented in a truzly unique manner. This is not a book of knots, it is the BOOK OF KNOTS. Was muss noch über Knoten gesagt werden? Fast 650 Seiten unglaubliches Wissen, präsentiert in einer wahrhaft einzigartigen Weise. Dies ist kein Buch über Knoten, es ist das BUCH DER KNOTEN.

Timothy E. Wise presents the first book to focus specifically on the musical content of yodeling in our culture. He shows that yodeling serves an aesthetic function in musical texts. A series of chronological chapters analyzes this musical tradition from its earliest appearances in Europe to its incorporation into a range of American genres and beyond. Wise posits the reasons for yodeling's changing status in our music. How and why was yodeling introduced into professional music making in the first place? What purposes has it served in musical texts? Why was it expunged from classical music? Why did it attach to some popular music genres and not others? Why does yodeling now appear principally at the margins of mainstream tastes? To answer such questions, Wise applies the perspectives of critical musicology, semiotics, and cultural studies to the changing semantic associations of yodeling in an unexplored repertoire stretching from Beethoven to Zappa. This volume marks the first musicological and ideological analysis of this prominent but largely ignored feature of American musical life. Maintaining high scholarly standards but keeping the general reader in mind, the author examines yodeling in relation to ongoing cultural debates about singing, music as art, social class, and gender. Chapters devote attention to yodeling in nineteenth-century classical music, the nineteenth-century Alpine-themed song in America, the Americanization of the yodel, Jimmie Rodgers, and cowboy yodeling, among other topics.

Graced by more than 200 illustrations, many of them seldom seen and some never before published, this sparkling volume offers vivid portraits of the men and women who created country music, the artists whose lives and songs formed the rich tradition from which so many others have drawn inspiration. Included here are not only such major figures as Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, Fiddlin' John Carson, Charlie Poole, and Gene Autry, who put country music on America's cultural map, but many fascinating lesser-known figures as well, such as Carson Robison, Otto Gray, Chris Bouchillon, Emry Arthur and dozens more, many of whose stories are told here for the first time. To map some of the winding, untraveled roads that connect today's music to its ancestors, Tony Russell draws upon new research and rare source material, such as contemporary newspaper reports and magazine articles, internet genealogy sites, and his own interviews with the musicians or their families. The result is a lively mix of colorful tales and anecdotes, priceless contemporary accounts of performances, illuminating social and historical context, and well-grounded critical judgment. The illustrations include artist photographs, record labels, song sheets, newspaper clippings, cartoons, and magazine covers, recreating the look and feel of the entire culture of country music. Each essay includes as well a playlist of recommended and currently available recordings for each artist. Finally, the paperback edition now features an extensive index.

Now for the first time, country music authority Charles K. Wolfe gathers together his profiles of 50 legends of country music, including Bill Monroe, Lefty Frizzell, and Kitty Wells.

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.

First Published in 2002. Transcending Boundaries is an autobiography tracing the multifaceted and wide­ranging career of choreographer. director, performer and professor of dance Donald McKayle. His chance meeting with the legendary Bill Robinson, who obligingly responded to the entreaties of an adoring nine-year-old and executed an impromptu version of his infectious stair tap-dance, and an electric encounter as a teenager sitting in a darkened theatre witnessing a performance by concert artist Pearl Primus, are key early experiences which bring about McKayle's life in dance, theatre, film, television, entertainment and education. He learned at the feet of the masters, trained and developed some of the profession's top practitioners, and worked in theatres and studios around the world -on Broadway, in Hollywood -creating a repertoire of acclaimed masterworks. He experienced failure, success, love, marriage and family. Readers will find his autobiography a revelation in an ongoing and still evolving story.

More than twenty years in the making, Country Music Records documents all country music recording sessions from 1921 through 1942. With primary research based on files and session logs from record companies, interviews with surviving musicians, as well as the 200,000 recordings archived at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's Frist Library and Archives, this notable work is the first compendium to accurately report the key details behind all the recording sessions of country music during the pre-World War II era. This discography documents--in alphabetical order by artist--every commercial country music recording, including unreleased sides, and indicates, as completely as possible, the musicians playing at every session, as well as instrumentation. This massive undertaking encompasses 2,500 artists, 5,000 session musicians, and 10,000 songs. Summary histories of each key record company are also provided, along with a bibliography. The discography includes indexes to all song titles and musicians listed.

For more than a decade, the Globe and Mail has featured comprehensive obituaries of notable British Columbians by columnist Tom Hawthorn. He recounts the lives of the recently departed in an engaging style, finding anecdotes to illuminate personality, giving voice to those who no longer have one. These stories are not about death, but about life in all its sad, funny, exhilarating complexity. Gathered here are the best, the funniest, the most memorable of the passing parade of characters who make life in British Columbia so remarkable. Here are athletes and authors, warriors and scholars, innovators and trailblazers. You will meet the boxer Baby Face and a wrestler known as Mean Gene; the yodeling cowboy singer Alberta Slim and a geologist called Professor Midas; the last living member of the RCMP posse that tracked down the Mad Trapper of Rat River and a demon barber whose preferred murder weapon was alcohol. You’ll go tracking with the the Cougar Lady of Sechelt, lift weights with the World’s Strongest Man, and wince from the blows of police truncheons used against labour leader Steve Brodie on Bloody Sunday, much of the blood spilled that day his own. You also will meet politicians of all stripes (including prison stripes). Hawthorn bids adieu to a panoply of characters in obits that are colourful and touching. The exuberance of his writing makes this book one of the great nonfiction reads of the season.