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Country Music: a Biographical Dictionary.

Article Excerpt
By Richard Carlin. New York: Routledge, 2003. [xvii, 496 p, ISBN 0-415-93802-3. $125.] Select bibliography, appendices, index.

Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music. Meade, Jr., with Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade. Chapel Hill: Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, in association with the John Edwards Memorial Forum, 2002. [xxii, 1002 p. ISBN 0-8078-2723-1. $90.] Bibliography, indexes.

Historians, folklorists, and English professors were the first to venture into the somewhat eccentric area of country music scholarship--a study that only slowly won its place within the conservative purview of musicology. The precariousness of country music's respectability within that world makes the potential impact of new works all the more powerful. Country music scholarship, along with that of other vernacular musics, raises another related issue in that audiences outside academia find it interesting. Richard Carlin's Biographical Dictionary and the Biblio-Discography by Meade, Spottswood, and Meade take directly opposite aim in relation to these two audiences: the former toward a popular audience and the latter toward scholars, collectors, and other serious researchers. As concerns their relative appeal to readers, the two works seem almost entirely mutually exclusive.

The Dictionary includes major stars as well as side musicians, comedians, producers, and songwriters. Carlin's aim is not to provide new information on important figures or trends, but to condense information found elsewhere into "essential thumbnail portraits" (p. xv). Biographical entries follow a set format: birthplace, birth date, and if appropriate, death date; a one- or twosentence description; an overview of childhood, musical development, and commercial success; a summary that includes any combination of career denouement, postmortem reflection, and look toward future possibilities. A select discography follows most entries and emphasizes current, accessible compact discs; some listings include annotation, either informative ("Ten of his Capitol hits from the mid-1960s," Del Reeves entry) or more colorfully opinionated ("1999 album of...

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