Here are 98 books that Hank fans have personally recommended if you like
Hank.
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We all know Little Richard’s great hits like "Long Tall, Sally", "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly Miss Molly" and Little Richard’s life was as wild as his records. It’s excess all areas as Spencer Leigh tells the story of Little Richard in Send Me Some Lovin. It is a biography of someone who transformed popular music. Spencer Leigh was born in 1945 and hearing Little Richard for the first time in 1956 changed his life. He is a world expert on the Beatles and he has written a series of music-based biographies – Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel – all of which are full of facts and opinions.
The Beatles in forensic detail up to the first Parlophone single, "Love Me Do".
Mark has interviewed almost everyone who mattered and he knows what to ask them and how to shape a book. I suggest you seek out the two-volume version running to 1,600 pages.
The Beatles are treated with as much reverence as Picasso and Shakespeare, and deservedly so.
Now in paperback, Tune In is the New York Times bestseller by the world’s leading Beatles authority – the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy about the band that revolutionized music.
The Beatles have been in our lives for half a century and surely always will be. Still, somehow, their music excites, their influence resonates, their fame sustains. New generations find and love them, and while many other great artists come and go, the Beatles are beyond eclipse.
So . . . who really were these people, and just how did it all happen?
I’m a student of biography. Artists, musicians, and comedians are what I read about. I crave to know what makes a great artist tick, how their ideas develop, and why they choose to pursue their craft at huge personal expense. I’m motivated to write more of my own. These biographies are informative, entertaining, and engaging reads, well worth your time. It’s a challenging and frustrating process to tell an artist’s story. Yet their roots, their influences, and how they shake up popular culture make for greater insight into our humanity. Artists take risks and I’m always impressed by the boldness of their vision.
Interested in learning more about the life and times of Mort Sahl? Then look no further! Curtis does a remarkable job of putting Sahl’s life and work into historical context, a key to understanding the evolution of stand-up comedy after 1950. The story of Sahl is the story of every comedian who wanted to speak truth to power in a funny way. Sahl shaped the style of George Carlin, Woody Allen, and David Steinberg. Curtis pays tribute to the comedian and the artistic legacy he left us. It was an important resource for my study of George Carlin.
On December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl (b. 1927) took the stage at San Francisco's hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged-Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers. He opened up jazz-inflected satire to a loose network of clubs, cut the first modern comedy album, and appeared on the cover of Time surrounded by caricatures of some of his frequent targets such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson,…
I’m a student of biography. Artists, musicians, and comedians are what I read about. I crave to know what makes a great artist tick, how their ideas develop, and why they choose to pursue their craft at huge personal expense. I’m motivated to write more of my own. These biographies are informative, entertaining, and engaging reads, well worth your time. It’s a challenging and frustrating process to tell an artist’s story. Yet their roots, their influences, and how they shake up popular culture make for greater insight into our humanity. Artists take risks and I’m always impressed by the boldness of their vision.
Jon Stewart once proclaimed that Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, and George Carlin were the “Holy Trinity” of stand-up comedy. After reading Scott Saul’s first-rate biography of Richard Pryor, I was transformed by the detailed writing and Saul’s portrait of an artist who struggled to find his voice. Saul’s premise was not to write a full biography but to examine the life and times of Pryor from his birth to his mid-life successes in 1980. I could not have written a book about George Carlin, Pryor’s contemporary, without Saul’s deeply researched tome. It’s a great read.
A major biography-intimate, gripping, revelatory-of an artist who revolutionized American comedy. Richard Pryor may have been the most unlikely star in Hollywood history. Raised in his family's brothels, he grew up an outsider to privilege. He took to the stage, originally, to escape the hard-bitten realities of his childhood, but later came to a reverberating discovery: that by plunging into the depths of his experience, he could make stand-up comedy as exhilarating and harrowing as the life he'd known. He brought that trembling vitality to Hollywood, where his movie career-Blazing Saddles, the buddy comedies with Gene Wilder, Blue Collar-flowed directly…
I’m a student of biography. Artists, musicians, and comedians are what I read about. I crave to know what makes a great artist tick, how their ideas develop, and why they choose to pursue their craft at huge personal expense. I’m motivated to write more of my own. These biographies are informative, entertaining, and engaging reads, well worth your time. It’s a challenging and frustrating process to tell an artist’s story. Yet their roots, their influences, and how they shake up popular culture make for greater insight into our humanity. Artists take risks and I’m always impressed by the boldness of their vision.
One of the most misunderstood artists of the last century has to be Yoko Ono. Donald Brackett, whose written biographies of Amy Winehouse, Tina Turner, and Sharon Jones, has done an excellent job of telling Ono’s story, going way beyond the standard, reductive tales about Ono and her relationship with John Lennon. His book traces Ono’s roots in Japan, her early works of performance art, and her time in New York in the Fifties mixing with the city’s art scene in Soho. Brackett’s love and respect for Ono’s artistic achievements shines throughout its pages.
For more than sixty years, Yoko Ono has fascinated us as one of the world’s most innovative, radical artists. From a childhood of both extraordinary privilege and extreme deprivation in war-time Japan, she adopted an outsider’s persona and moved to America where, after a spell at Sarah Lawrence College, she made a place for herself in bohemian arts circles. She was already twice divorced and established as a performance artist in the Fluxus movement and in Tokyo’s avant-garde scene before her fortuitous meeting with the Beatles’ John Lennon at a London Gallery in 1966.
As a lifelong country music fan and musician, I absolutely love to read about the lives of country music stars. I began reading about the history of country music when I was twelve years old out of my interest in such performers as Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, and especially Jimmie Rodgers. There are quite a few really good books, so it was difficult to narrow down to five. But I think these can set anyone well along the road to learning about this uniquely American music and the colorful lives of its performers.
Diane Diekman is an outstanding writer, her biography of Marty Robbins winning the 2013 Best Book on Country Music Award.
Great as that book is, her biography of Faron Young best captures the distinct colorful feel of midcentury country music. Its subject was a rounder from Louisiana, a contemporary of Hank Williams who really did live out a fast life.
As one of the best-known honky tonkers to appear in the wake of Hank Williams's death, Faron Young was a popular presence on Nashville's music scene for more than four decades. The Singing Sheriff produced a string of Top Ten hits, placed over eighty songs on the country music charts, and founded the long-running country music periodical Music City News in 1963. Flamboyant, impulsive, and generous, he helped and encouraged a new generation of talented songwriter-performers that included Willie Nelson and Bill Anderson. In 2000, four years after his untimely death, Faron was inducted into the Country Music Hall of…
As a lifelong country music fan and musician, I absolutely love to read about the lives of country music stars. I began reading about the history of country music when I was twelve years old out of my interest in such performers as Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, and especially Jimmie Rodgers. There are quite a few really good books, so it was difficult to narrow down to five. But I think these can set anyone well along the road to learning about this uniquely American music and the colorful lives of its performers.
This book is particularly special to me. I have always been a huge Jimmie Rodgers fan and have loved Nolan Porterfield’s biography of him.
As important as Porterfield’s biography is, Barry Mazor’s Meeting Jimmie Rodgers shows the full impact of Rodgers's music while also updating his life story with newly-discovered information. This book, maybe more than any other, inspired me to write my book.
In the nearly eight decades since his death from tuberculosis at age thirty-five, singer-songwriter Jimmie Rodgers has been an inspiration for numerous top performers-from Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Bill Monroe and Hank Williams to Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, and Beck. How did this Mississippi-born vaudevillian, a former railroad worker who performed so briefly so long ago, produce tones, tunes, and themes that have had such broad influence and made him the model for the way American roots music stars could become popular heroes? In Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, the first book to explore the deep legacy of…
My research and writing about music, particularly country and other Southern genres, began with the "Louisiana Hayride", a radio barn dance in the post-World War II era that launched both Hank Williams and Elvis Presley to prominence. From there, I turned to the long-running PBS music showcase Austin City Limits, which now names a huge music festival as well. In both projects, understanding music encompassed larger contexts of region, media, and meaning, all of which bear on understanding Dolly Parton as a musician and songwriter; as Appalachian; as a recording, TV, and movie star; and as a global cultural icon. I’ve never known life without Dolly Parton in it. Of this, I’m glad.
This book is a classic. Along with the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country recordings and Bill Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A., my own interest in writing about country music began here.
When a senior scholar advised that country music lacked “respectability” as an academic topic, this book was among the small set of works that sealed my confidence to do what I wanted and figure it would all work itself out (Dolly does what she wants, too!).
In compiling biographical profiles of women in country music, this book also filled in a whole portion of history typically glossed over in most country music writing up until that point. It likewise planted seeds for future research and writing on the history of women in the genre, which continues to bear fruit today.
From country's earliest pioneers to its greatest legends, this work documents the lives of the female artists who have shaped the music for over 200 years. Through interviews, photographs, and primary texts, this work weaves a complex tapestry of personalities and talent. It gets to the heart of the special bond female artists have with their audiences. People seeking to understand the context out of which mega-stars such as Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and the Dixie Chicks emerged should look no farther than this guide. Some of the women discussed include Dolly Parton, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Montana, Alison Krauss, Martha…
As a lifelong country music fan and musician, I absolutely love to read about the lives of country music stars. I began reading about the history of country music when I was twelve years old out of my interest in such performers as Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, and especially Jimmie Rodgers. There are quite a few really good books, so it was difficult to narrow down to five. But I think these can set anyone well along the road to learning about this uniquely American music and the colorful lives of its performers.
This memoir by Charlie Louvin of performing with his brother, Ira, distills country music’s unique midcentury flavor.
Growing up singing Sacred Harp harmonies, the Louvin brothers eventually made it onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. But being on top of the world could not keep Ira’s demons from dragging him down amid alcoholism and violence that lead to his wife shooting him and a tragic demise.
The beautiful and tragic saga of the Louvin Brothers - one of the most legendary country duos of all time - is one of America's great untold stories. Charlie Louvin was a good, god-fearing, churchgoing singer, but his brother Ira had the devil in him and was known for smashing his mandolin to splinters onstage, cussing out Elvis Presley, and trying to strangle his third wife with a telephone cord. "Satan is Real" is the incredible tale of Charlie Louvin's sixty-five-year career, the timeless murder ballads of the Louvin Brothers, and the epic tale of two brothers bound together by…
As a lifelong country music fan and musician, I absolutely love to read about the lives of country music stars. I began reading about the history of country music when I was twelve years old out of my interest in such performers as Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, and especially Jimmie Rodgers. There are quite a few really good books, so it was difficult to narrow down to five. But I think these can set anyone well along the road to learning about this uniquely American music and the colorful lives of its performers.
Hemphill’s book captures country music in the 1960s.
His portraits of country stars and the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium present vivid images. They are so artful that you feel you have yourself experienced the moment from the inside. This is really an excellent book in any category—a tour de force of nonfiction.
While on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, journalist and novelist Paul Hemphill wrote of that pivotal moment in the late sixties when traditional defenders of the hillbilly roots of country music were confronted by the new influences and business realities of pop music.
The demimonde of the traditional Nashville venues (Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, Robert's Western World, and the Ryman Auditorium) and first-wave artists (Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Lefty Frizzell) are shown coming into first contact, if not conflict, with a new wave of pop-influenced and business savvy country performers (Jeannie C. "Harper Valley PTA" Riley, Johnny Ryles, and Glen…
As a lifelong country music fan and musician, I absolutely love to read about the lives of country music stars. I began reading about the history of country music when I was twelve years old out of my interest in such performers as Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, and especially Jimmie Rodgers. There are quite a few really good books, so it was difficult to narrow down to five. But I think these can set anyone well along the road to learning about this uniquely American music and the colorful lives of its performers.
Patsy Cline’s story is one for the ages, and Ellis Nassour brings it to life in this book.
This one has all the tragic elements of country music—Patsy Cline endured heartbreak, abuse, car wrecks, and so many more challenges. And she channeled all of it into some of the greatest music ever.
Earthy, sexy, and vivacious, the life of beloved country singer, Patsy Cline, who soared from obscurity to international fame to tragic death in just thirty short years, is explored in colorful and poignant detail. An innovator—and even a hell-raiser—Cline broke all the boys’ club barriers of Nashville’s music business in the 1950s and brought a new Nashville sound to the nation with her pop hits and torch ballads like “Walking After Midnight,” “I Fall to Pieces“ and "Crazy.” She is the subject of a major Hollywood movie and countless articles, and her albums are still selling 45 years after her…
