"Margo Price is from Aledo, in western Illinois; she's a Midwest farmer's daughter who moves to Nashville to become a musician. She waits tables, busks on the street, plays open mics, and talks to her uncle, Bob Fischer, a songwriter for dozens of country music legends. Uncle Bob's advice is to throw away her TV and do nothing but write. So, discouraged but determined, she does. Price writes constantly, but she's also trying to meet industry people...

""Screw music doesn't peak. It just grinds." DJ Screw was a Houston DJ who became famous in the 1990s for slowing down rap songs (think: playing a 45 rpm record at 33 1/3 speed), and repeating key lyrics, while local rappers sometimes freestyled over the instrumental portions of the mix. The slowed-down sound became synonymous with Houston, and was often referred to as "chopped & Screwed." It was literally homemade music; Screw recorded in his house,...

The musician & producer reflects on New York City's early punk rock scene, as well as the creation of some of his most famous albums in this memoir. Popular music was in a creative upheaval in the late 1970s. As the singer-songwriter and producer Chris Stamey remembers, "the old guard had become bloated, cartoonish, and widely co-opted by a search for maximum corporate profits, and we wanted none of it." In A Spy in the House of Loud, he takes us...

In this collection of personal essays, women music writers pay tribute to female country artists from June Carter Cash and Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift. Part history, part confessional, and part celebration of country music and the women who make it, Woman Walk the Line is an intimate collection of essays from some of America's most intriguing women writers. It celebrates how these groundbreaking musicians have provided pivot points, important truths,...

A chronicle of Adams's rise from alt-country to rock stardom, featuring stories about the making of the albums Strangers Almanac and Heartbreaker. Before he achieved his dream of being an internationally known rock personality, Ryan Adams had a band in Raleigh, North Carolina. Whiskeytown led the wave of insurgent-country bands that came of age with No Depression magazine in the mid-1990s, and for many people it defined the era. Adams was an irrepressible...

The crowd sways to the melodic strumming of a bossa nova guitarist. A vocalist belts out lyrics that blend English and Spanish. Couples dance to salsa's syncopated rhythms. These are the sounds of Latin music. Before Latin music exploded into the mainstream in the 1990s, it was on the sidelines of American pop. Ritchie Valens fused Latin dance music with rock. Julio Iglesias popularized Latin ballads in the United States. And Gloria Estefan was the...

"African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll-from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history...

Los Lobos leaped into the national spotlight in 1987, when their cover of "La Bamba" became a No. 1 hit. But what looked like an overnight achievement to the band's new fans was actually a way station in a long musical journey that began in East Los Angeles in 1973 and is still going strong. Across four decades, Los Lobos (Cesar Rosas, Conrad Lozano, David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez, and Steve Berlin) have ranged through virtually the entire breadth of...

A musical force across four decades, a voice for the ages, and a great songwriter, Chrissie Hynde is one of America's foremost rockers. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, she and her band The Pretenders have released ten albums since 1980. The Pretenders' debut LP has been acclaimed as one of the best albums of all time by VH1 and Rolling Stone. In a business filled with "pretenders" and posers, Hynde remains unassailably authentic....

Find out what inspired rock pioneers to pick up their guitars. Discover the stories of outrageous punks and grungy alternative rockers. And learn more about legends such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Metallica, and Green Day.