The Long Gone Lonesome History of Country Music
Starred Review.Grade 4–6—This tongue-in-cheek overview features a folksy narrative of how and why country music developed in the barns and back roads of rural America. The text doesn't miss a beat—it covers instruments, early recordings, yodeling (with a humorous spread on how-to), the Great Depression, gospel, movie cowboys, a "paper-doll" spoof of singers' costumes, hillbilly jazz, World War II, acceptable country pets (hound dogs, varmints, hawgs), country "vee-hickles," Nashville, the age of TV, the 1990s explosion of country sound, and much more. While poking fun at itself with a "country words" dictionary and a segment on "country hair," the book offers a vast amount of historical fact amid a multitude of caricatures of country stars. Some of the pages are quite dark, but the ever-changing backgrounds and fonts with colored-pencil and crayon illustrations carry an amazing variation of detail. The book gets a bit over-the-top with "The Big List of Country Nicknames," stars depicted as winged cupids on the cover, and Hank Williams's problems with pistols, but country-music fans probably will only mind that there are faces not present. A long who's who at the back identifies the performers pictured throughout. Holly George-Warren'sHonky-Tonk Heroes & Hillbilly Angels(Houghton, 2006) offers a simple biographical look at a few artists, while Bertholf's broad view goes further to explain the genre to young readers and does so in an entertaining manner.—Mary Elam, Forman Elementary School, Plano, TXCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.