Iris Cooper has been singing ever since she can remember, hitting the high notes like no one else. When she is twelve, her father convinces the owner of a bar in Lake City, Texas, to let her perform, and she stuns the audience. In the ensuing years, never staying anywhere for long, father and daughter move from one dusty town to the next, her passion for music growing every time she takes the mike in another roadhouse. But it is not an easy life for...

"For the first time ever, ... singer-songwriter Dolly Parton brings you behind the lyrics of 175 of her songs to reveal the personal stories and ... memories that have inspired sixty years of songwriting. Lushly illustrated and told in Dolly's ... voice, this ... collection offers an intimate, exclusive look at the colorful life, prolific career, and rags-to-rhinestones journey of one of the most revered entertainers of our time"--

His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk's hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental,...

"Sloan Monroe can't catch a break. Two years after losing her fiancé, her life consists of cemetery visits, unorthodox art projects, and drinking sessions with her best friend Kristen. So when a dog dashes in front of her car and gets her a ticket for obstructing traffic, [she's] at her wits' end. But after meeting the ridiculously attractive and charming owner of the trouble-making retriever, she begins to think that maybe her luck has finally started...

"Childhood biographies of sixteen musicians, including pop songwriters, classical performers, and R&B singers"--

Jazz is conducted almost wordlessly: John Coltrane rarely told his quartet what to do, and Miles Davis famously gave his group only the barest instructions before recording his masterpiece Kind of Blue. Musicians often avoid discussing their craft for fear of destroying its improvisational essence, rendering jazz among the most ephemeral and least transparent of the performing arts. In The Jazz Ear, acclaimed music critic Ben Ratliff discusses with...

In a series of twenty candid interviews with radical women musicians, author Zora von Burden gives the forerunners of this generation a voice and probes the depths of how and why they broke through society's limitations to create works of outstanding measure. Among the musical genres covered are rock, punk, goth, industrial, electronica, performance art, lounge, and more. An inspiration to young women and fascinating to music fans of all ages and...

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee presents reflections on her inner life from the unique perspectives of the cafes and cultural haunts she has visited and worked in around the world. --Publisher's description. An unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist. It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Woven throughout...

Merle Haggard was one of the most important country music musicians who ever lived. His astonishing musical career stretched across the second half of the 20th Century and into the first two decades of the next, during which he released an extraordinary 63 albums, 38 that made it on to Billboard's Country Top Ten, 13 that went to #1, and 37 #1 hit singles. With his ample songbook, unique singing voice and brilliant phrasing that illuminated his uncompromising...

Here is the riveting, soul-stirring story of Jonah Kirk, son of an exceptional singer, grandson of a formidable "piano man," a musical prodigy beginning to explore his own gifts when he crosses a group of extremely dangerous people, with shattering consequences. Set in a more innocent time not so long ago, The City encompasses a lifetime but unfolds over three extraordinary, heart-racing years of tribulation and triumph, in which Jonah first grasps...