Carolina Bluegrass


Book Description

In the Carolinas, bluegrass is more than music--it's a way of life. The origins of the genre date back to the earliest frontier settlements, and banjo music appeared at dances in Greenville, South Carolina, as early as 1780. The genre was essential to socialization in the textile mills of both states. Old-time music of the Blue Ridge Mountains heavily influenced the sound. Bill Monroe, considered by many to be the father of bluegrass, began his recording career in Charlotte in 1936. Many of the most popular bands, such as the Hired Hands and Briarhoppers, regularly performed live on local television stations in Columbia, Spartanburg and Charlotte. Today, bluegrass festivals fill local calendars across the region. Author Gail Wilson-Giarratano uses interviews and the historic record to tell this unique and compelling story.




Carolina Bluegrass


Book Description

In the Carolinas, bluegrass is more than music--it's a way of life. The origins of the genre date back to the earliest frontier settlements, and banjo music appeared at dances in Greenville, South Carolina, as early as 1780. The genre was essential to socialization in the textile mills of both states. Old-time music of the Blue Ridge Mountains heavily influenced the sound. Bill Monroe, considered by many to be the father of bluegrass, began his recording career in Charlotte in 1936. Many of the most popular bands, such as the Hired Hands and Briarhoppers, regularly performed live on local television stations in Columbia, Spartanburg and Charlotte. Today, bluegrass festivals fill local calendars across the region. Author Gail Wilson-Giarratano uses interviews and the historic record to tell this unique and compelling story.




High Lonesome


Book Description

A close-up look at country music argues that it has become a national art form, reflecting the same themes that have characterized American art and literature over three centuries




Moon Blue Ridge Parkway Road Trip


Book Description

Hit the Road with Moon Travel Guides! The Blue Ridge Parkway connects the green valleys of Shenandoah National Park to the Great Smoky Mountains. Drive America's most scenic highway with Moon Blue Ridge Parkway Road Trip. Inside you'll find: Maps and Driving Tools: 29 easy-to-use maps keep you oriented on and off the highway, along with site-to-site mileage, driving times, and detailed directions for the entire route Eat, Sleep, Stop and Explore: Listen to live bluegrass with a glass of local moonshine, drive past fields brimming with fireflies, and wander through American history. You'll know exactly what you want to do at each stop with lists of the best hikes, views, and more Itineraries for Every Traveler: Drive the entire two-week route or follow strategic itineraries like "Music of the Blue Ridge," including suggestions for spending time in in Washington DC, Front Royal, Waynesboro, Roanoke, Galax, Asheville, Cherokee, and Knoxville Local Expert: North Carolinian and mountaineer Jason Frye shares his love of the Great Smoky Mountains (and where to find the best barbecue!) Planning Your Trip: Know when and where to get gas, how to avoid traffic, tips for driving in different road and weather conditions, and suggestions for LGBTQ travelers, seniors, and road trippers with kids With Moon Blue Ridge Parkway Road Trip's practical tips, detailed itineraries, and local insight, you're ready to fill up the tank and hit the road. Looking to explore more of America on wheels? Try Moon Nashville to New Orleans Road Trip! Doing more than driving through? Check out Moon Blue Ridge & Smoky Mountains or Moon North Carolina.




A Place Called District 12


Book Description

When creating her post-apocalyptic world of The Hunger Games, author Suzanne Collins drew from various real-world history and geography, particularly from Appalachia, which is reflected in the culture and location of District 12. With the release of her 2019 prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Collins brought readers deeper into Appalachia's extraordinary cultural diversity and its storied musical traditions. This book provides a tour of human geography, history and culture that establishes the foundation for the saga's novels and films. Told from the expertise of a geographer, it explores how place can shape culture, how social and geographical concepts intersect and how these ideas apply to The Hunger Games. Specifically, the work explores the idea of "home," and how attachment to a place is strengthened through landscape, geography and song.




The Music of Bill Monroe


Book Description

Spanning over 1,000 separate performances, The Music of Bill Monroe presents a complete chronological list of all of Bill Monroe's commercially released sound and visual recordings. Each chapter begins with a narrative describing Monroe's life and career at that point, bringing in producers, sidemen, and others as they become part of the story. The narratives read like a "who's who" of bluegrass, connecting Monroe to the music's larger history and containing many fascinating stories. The second part of each chapter presents the discography. Information here includes the session's place, date, time, and producer; master/matrix numbers, song/tune titles, composer credits, personnel, instruments, and vocals; and catalog/release numbers and reissue data. The only complete bio-discography of this American musical icon, The Music of Bill Monroe is the starting point for any study of Monroe's contributions as a composer, interpreter, and performer.




All Music Guide


Book Description

Arranged in sixteen musical categories, provides entries for twenty thousand releases from four thousand artists, and includes a history of each musical genre.




The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture


Book Description

This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture examines how mass media have shaped popular perceptions of the South--and how the South has shaped the history of mass media. An introductory overview by Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith is followed by 40 thematic essays and 132 topical articles that examine major trends and seminal moments in film, television, radio, press, and Internet history. Among topics explored are the southern media boom, beginning with the Christian Broadcast Network and CNN; popular movies, television shows, and periodicals that have shaped ideas about the region, including Gone with the Wind, The Beverly Hillbillies, Roots, and Southern Living; and southern media celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Truman Capote, and Stephen Colbert. The volume details the media's involvement in southern history, from depictions of race in the movies to news coverage of the civil rights movement and Hurricane Katrina. Taken together, these entries reveal and comment on the ways in which mass media have influenced, maintained, and changed the idea of a culturally unique South.




Strangers Below


Book Description

Before the Bible Belt fastened itself across the South, competing factions of evangelicals fought over their faith's future, and a contrarian sect, self-named the Primitive Baptists, made its stand. Joshua Guthman here tells the story of how a band of antimissionary and antirevivalistic Baptists defended Calvinism, America's oldest Protestant creed, from what they feared were the unbridled forces of evangelical greed and power. In their harrowing confessions of faith and in the quavering uncertainty of their singing, Guthman finds the emotional catalyst of the Primitives' early nineteenth-century movement: a searing experience of doubt that motivated believers rather than paralyzed them. But Primitives' old orthodoxies proved startlingly flexible. After the Civil War, African American Primitives elevated a renewed Calvinism coursing with freedom's energies. Tracing the faith into the twentieth century, Guthman demonstrates how a Primitive Baptist spirit, unmoored from its original theological underpinnings, seeped into the music of renowned southern artists such as Roscoe Holcomb and Ralph Stanley, whose "high lonesome sound" appealed to popular audiences searching for meaning in the drift of postwar American life. In an account that weaves together religious, emotional, and musical histories, Strangers Below demonstrates the unlikely but enduring influence of Primitive Baptists on American religious and cultural life.




Speed Bumps on a Dirt Road


Book Description

Speed Bumps on a Dirt Roadis a living document of country music's founding fathers and mothers. John Cohen photographed musicians, at home, backstage at public events, from the wings at fiddlers' conventions, out in country music parks, and in the studio for live radio show performances and recording sessions. Back in 1961 it was still possible to know a few of America's original country musicians from the '20s and '30s. Renowned and celebrated musician and artist John Cohen came of age at the confluence of old time and early bluegrass music, the historic intersection of traditional and folk music. Cohen traveled the country playing music, recording, and documenting what was to be a generation of musicians who would influence American music and culture for decades to come. Traveling between the Union Grove fiddlers' convention to the Grand Ole Opry to a coal celebration in Hazard, Kentucky, Cohen made historic photographs of performers like Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, the country's very first all-bluegrass show, and a bluegrass bar in Baltimore, among much more.Speed Bumps on a Dirt Roadpresents old time music as the root of country music. Includes photographs of: Flatt & Scruggs, fiddler "Eck" Robertsonin Amarillo, Texas, Doc Watson, bluegrass fiddler "Tex" Logan, the Stanley Brothers at Sunset Park, Sara and Maybelle of the Carter Family, and Cousin Emmy, Alice & Hazel, and a dulcimer in a parking lot.