Honky-Tonk Heroes and Hillbilly Angels: The Pioneers of Country and Western Music

I was a fan of Warren and Levine's first collaboration, Shake, Rattle & Roll: The Founders of Rock & Roll so I was ever so pleased to see them take up this music. Holly George Warren certainly has the bona fides to write about the subject. A book like this reminds me of how much fun a school librarian can have with lesson plans. I can imagine using this to teach "Biography" and sharing these musicians' music along with their stories. Kids today sing "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" but have they ever heard of Gene Autry? Shouldn't they experience the musical virtuosity of Bill Monroe? Warren has a one page biography on each artist with important dates and milestones from their life and career. She begins the book, appropriately, at the beginning, with a profile on the Carter family. Laura Levine has painted a full page portrait of each musician with their name worked into the art work. Each member of the Carter family is designated along with "The First Family of Country Music." Bill Monroe is titled "The Father of Bluegrass" and Loretta Lynn's "The Coal Miner's Daughter" appears in the smoke plume coming from a small cabin. Each painting is featured in a period frame so you feel as if you are looking at a grouping of family pictures. All the greats are included: Patsy Cline, Roy Acuff, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubbs, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Tammy Wynette and more. I think it would be so much fun during Rodeo time here in the Lone Star State, to turn on some Western (we call it Texas) Swing and share the story of Bob Wills.

I realize there's been some stink about publishers adding extra bells and whistles like CDs, but this book could surely have used it. Some of these quirky country folk just beg to be heard. In this collection of 14 all-too-brief bios of Country and Western crooners, we meet the pluckers, twangers, pickers, warblers and yodelers who wove not one but several uniquely American sounds out of strands of gospel, folk music and even hobo ballads. They were roustabouts and hucksters, floosies and boozers who managed to turn their hard luck into hard-driving tunes -- if it didn't kill them first. There's the familiar Man in Black -- Johnny Cash -- whose "Boy Named Sue" was written by Shel Silverstein, or "Blue Yodeler" Jimmie Rodgers and others who swapped out monikers and band names as often as they changed 10-gallon hats. There's the tragic Hank Williams, who died at age 30, and the campy Buck Owens of "Hee Haw" fame, as well as such household names as Loretta Lynn and Gene Autry. Now, don't you wish you could hear at least a few samples? The closest I have is the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou? with its covers of the Carter Family's "Keep on the Sunny Side" and Rodgers "In the Jailhouse Now," among others. Not only don't we get to hear them, but the prose is too encyclopedia-sounding, too bare bones official when what we want is more juicy stuff. We get teased with a line here or there about this one's tempestuous marriage or that one's fatal TB, and way too many mentions of back-up bands that broke up and bit players who left or faded into obscurity. Even so, how could you not love these rags-to-rhinestones tales of true American originals. The self-taught Levine paints in that faux folksy or nouveau naive style I sometimes rail about, but it works fine here, amusingly paired with antique wooden frames. The flat, exaggerated figures and eye-scorching colors may seem childlike, but they slyly capture the wry self-deprecation and anti-snob appeal of folks who named the Grand Ole Opry as a tweak to us cultchah'd types. An absolute shame I can't sample their talents. And I'm not even a country fan.