Are You Ready for the Country

This book does an excellent job of tracing the half-century relationship between country music and rock 'n' roll. I don't find it "muddled" at all and prefer the detailed information over a more streamlined slant that would have sacrificed information for an "angle." The author dwells on sensationalistic events (there certainly are enough of them to go around) only to the extent needed to provide context for the musical developments. His respect for the musicians and their music is obvious and appreciated.

Peter Doggett is clearly in love with the intersection of country with rock music and has amazing anecdotes to tell about Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and about 100 other greater and lesser lights of country rock. His knowledge is encyclopedic and his opinions are well-formed and well-informed. I, like Doggett, fell for country music around the time of Dylan's Nashville Skyline and the Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and in many ways never looked back. Gram Parsons entered into my personal mythology with the release of Gilded Palace Of Sin and got cemented there by his self-destruction in 1972. One of the best things about this book is that it managed to "demythologize" Parsons and helped me understand what he meant. Parsons was so afraid of not being hip and on the cutting edge, that he could not survive. After he had preached the gospel of country traditionalism, he couldn't get it together to become "traditional" unlike those closest to him. This book is, at it's core, about Parsons and the impulses he represented. The subtitle (Elvis, Dylan, Parsons and the roots of country rock) is ill-fitting and sounds as if it was pasted on by a Penguin editor or marketing drone because books about Dylan and Elvis sell. I also like the fact that Doggett made me reconsider artists I dismissed 30 years ago (such as Michael Nesmith). The most compelling parts of the book are insights into the personalities and the least compelling parts are the crush of minutiae about recording sessions and discographies..."and then Roseanne Cash went into the studio with Don Was..." that kind of thing - didn't add new insight. Very good book, though. Nostalgia+new appreciations+new artists+hilariously dry opinions ("hat act" will never mean the same thing again).

In the early months of 1966, Bob Dylan journeyed to Nashville to make what many regard as his masterwork - Blonde on Blonde, released in late spring of that year to a mixed response that has been obscured by the intervening years of baby-boomer hagiography and nostalgia. At the time, Dylan's surrealistic lyrics and increasingly edgy public persona lead many fans of his earlier acoustic-oriented material to condemn him as a traitor and a sellout to commercial interests - a moment that has been encapsulated in the marvelous live recording from Dylan's world tour of April and May of '66, released by Columbia/Sony as The Genuine Bootleg Series, Vol. 4, or Live 1966. But this pivotal moment is not the platform upon which Peter Doggett bases his groundbreaking study of the dialog between country music and rock music, Are You Ready for the Country. Rather, it is the seemingly offhand decision that Dylan made in recording Blonde on Blonde - to relocate temporarily to Nashville and record with the cream of Nashville's session musician elite, that begins Doggett's fascinating and sometimes frustrating study of country music as it extends back and forth across time from this recording. Doggett's narrative partially revolves around the interesting idea that Dylan's recording in Nashville is a more significant event in the birth of what has been termed `country-rock' than the more recognizable signposts of Dylan's John Wesley Harding (1968) or Nashville Skyline (1969), or the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968). After Blonde on Blonde, Nashville became a fashionable environment for rock musicians to record in, and Nashville session players such as Charlie McCoy, Kenny Buttrey, and Pete Drake became recognized and sought-after names for sessions by musicians from the rock field. Doggett traces the influence that Dylan's Nashville gesture had on the other eminent stars of sixties rock: The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young), and the Grateful Dead all moved towards a more country oriented sound in the late sixties. This musical and cultural climate also accounts for some of the most popular music made during the 1970's - the soft country-rock of groups such as the Eagles, Poco, and Cactus. The hackneyed image of the rock-star as cowboy that became common during this era serves as a metaphor for the decay of a vital experiment into slick and professional L.A. hedonism. Doggett outlines this shift with a rueful and detail-oriented eye, tracing how this image of country has fed back into country music, producing the many and indistinguishable 'hat acts' of nineties commercial country. Doggett is sometimes less successful in documenting an influence from rock into country, at least in the 1960's. The influence and intermingling of rock and country is referenced in the careers of Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Ray Price, and Marty Robbins. Perhaps because country's response to rock was, especially in the 1960's (and arguably