Bean Blossom


Book Description

Bean Blossom, Indiana is home to the annual Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival, founded in 1967 by Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass. Here, Adler discusses the development of bluegrass music, the many personalities involved in the bluegrass music scene, the interplay of local, regional, and national interests, and more.




Brown County


Book Description

Nine years before Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Story came into being. In 1851, Pres. Millard Fillmore granted a land patent to Dr. George Story for the creation of this little town. Tucked into a scenic spot near the Hoosier National Forest, 13 miles southeast of Nashville, Indiana, Story lies deep in the heart of historic Brown County. And Story is just one reason to visit Brown County, also known as "the Art Colony of the Midwest." Amid forests, rolling hills, and winding country roads, charming Nashville is home to more than 120 shops, art galleries, and artists' studios and neighbors two villages quaintly named Gnawbone and Bean Blossom. The beauty of Brown County has always attracted artists and history buffs. Wander back roads across covered bridges that have spanned sparkling streams for more than a century to retrace the paths taken by artists seeking to capture the county's beauty.




Looking Back to See


Book Description

Revealing, entertaining window on the music of the ’50s and ’60s







Finding Charity’s Folk


Book Description

Finding Charity’s Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre. Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as Folks, freedom, like enslavement, was tied to a bondwoman’s reproductive capacities. Their offspring were used to perpetuate the slave economy. Finding loopholes in the law meant that enslaved women could give birth to and raise free children. For Millward, Folks demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries between slavery and freedom, which was due largely to the gendered space occupied by enslaved women. The gendering of freedom influenced notions of liberty, equality, and race in what became the new nation and had profound implications for African American women’s future interactions with the state.




The Other Feminists


Book Description

"This book enriches our understanding of the women's movement in the United States by showing how feminists captured a place for their goals on the agendas of four male-dominated liberal organizations in the 1960s and 1970s: the International Union of Electrical Workers, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Council of Churches, and the Ford Foundation. Susan M. Hartmann examines the efforts of women and men who had few ties to the independent women's movement - and thus have been neglected in studies of second-wave feminism - but who nonetheless contributed substantially to the spread of feminist ideas and practices into the mainstream of American society. These establishment groups furnished money, legitimacy, and access to the critical arenas of public opinion and government." "Revising the common view that the second wave of feminism was a white middle-class phenomenon, Hartmann discovers significant numbers of women of color and working-class women who pushed feminist agendas."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved




I Thought It Was Just Me (but it Isn't)


Book Description

First published in 2007 with the title: I thought it was just me: women reclaiming power and courage in a culture of shame.




Oddball Indiana


Book Description

Indiana often calls itself the Crossroads of the Nation. It's not also perhaps the very nexus of US weirdness. Armed with Oddball Indiana, you'll soon discover the strange underbelly of the Hoosier State, from brain sandwiches to square donuts. Indiana has monuments to Michael Jackson, the comic strip character Joe Palooka, and the World's Largest Egg. It's where Alka-Seltzer and Wonder Bread were invented, where A Christmas Story actually took place, and where the good but angry citizens of Plainfield conspired to dump President Martin Van Buren in a mud puddle. Along with humorous histories and offbeat observations, Oddball Indiana provides addresses, websites, hours, fees, and driving directions for each of its 350+ entries.




Brown County Stories


Book Description

BROWN COUNTY STORIES Some Personal Recollections The purpose of this book is to share some of the fun and interesting things that happened when I was growing up in Brown County. The stories offered here were told to my five daughters around campfires and at many bedtime sessions as they were growing up. They requested that I tell them over and over again. They heard these stories, and many others like them, so many times they said they felt like they actually grew up with Cobweb, and Virgil, and Hazel, and Sis, and Bobby, and Stretch. After many retellings I was once obliged to let my youngest daughter know that I had told her everything I could remember, or even make up. To which she replied, “OK then, just start over.” The various accounts of these uncommon experiences were reinforced for my daughters when they visited their grandmother who lived in Nashville, the County Seat of Brown County, and were able to explore the territory where they took place. All of these stories are based on things that actually happened to me and other live people in the good old days in Brown County. They are as true as creative memory will allow.




Whisperin' Bill Anderson


Book Description

Whisperin' Bill: An Unprecedented Life in Country Music presents a revealing portrait of Bill Anderson, one of the most prolific songwriters in the history of country music. Mega country music hits like "City Lights," (Ray Price), "Tips Of My Fingers," (Roy Clark, Eddy Arnold, Steve Wariner), "Once A Day," (Connie Smith), "Saginaw, Michigan," (Lefty Frizzell), and many more flowed from his pen, making him one of the most decorated songwriters in music history. But the iconic singer, songwriter, performer, and TV host came to a point in his career where he questioned if what he had to say mattered anymore. Music Row had changed, a new generation of artists and songwriters had transformed the genre, and the Country Music Hall of Fame member and fifty-year Grand Ole Opry star was no longer relevant. By 1990, he wasn't writing anymore. Bad investments left him teetering at bankruptcy's edge. His marriage was falling apart. And in Nashville, a music town where youth often carries the day, he was a museum piece--only seen as a nostalgia act, waving from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. Anderson was only in his fifties when he assumed he had climbed all the mountains he was intended to scale. But in those moments plagued with self-doubt, little did he know, his most rewarding climb lie ahead. A follow-up to his 1989 autobiography, this honest and revealing book tells the story of a man with an unprecedented gift, holding on to it in order to share it. Known as "Whisperin' Bill" to generations of fans for his soft vocalizations and spoken lyrics, Anderson is the only songwriter in country music history to have a song on the charts in each of the past seven consecutive decades. He has celebrated chart-topping success as a recording artist with eighty charting singles and thirty-seven Top Ten country hits, including "Still," "8 x 10," "I Love You Drops," and "Mama Sang A Song." A six-time Song of the Year Award-winner and BMI Icon Award recipient, Anderson has taken home many CMA and ACM Award trophies and garnered multiple GRAMMY nominations. His knack for the spoken word has also made him a successful television host, having starred on "The Bill Anderson Show," "Opry Backstage," "Country's Family Reunion," and others. Moreover, his multi-faceted success extends far beyond the country format with artists like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Dean Martin, and Elvis Costello recording his songs. Today, thanks to the support of musical peers and a few famous friends who believed in him, Anderson continues to forge the path of lyrical integrity in music, harnessing his ability to craft a song that tells a familiar story, grabs you by the heart and moves you. Modern day examples include "Whiskey Lullaby" (Brad Paisley and Allison Krauss), "Give It Away" (George Strait), "A Lot of Things Different" (Kenny Chesney), and "Which Bridge to Cross" (Vince Gill). A product of a long-gone Nashville, Anderson worked to reinvent himself, and this biography documents Anderson's fifty-plus-year career--a career he once thought unattainable. Richly illustrated with black-and-white photos of Anderson interacting with the superstars of American music, including such legends as Patsy Cline, Vince Gill, and Steve Wariner, this book highlights Anderson's trajectory in the business and his influence on the past, present, and future of this dynamic genre.