True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass: Jimmy Martin - Hardcover

Tom Piazza

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826513603 ISBN 13: 9780826513601

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Jimmy Martin was just twenty-two years old when Bill Monroe asked him to join the Blue Grass Boys. That invitation was the start of a fifty-year recording career, recently celebrated with Martin's induction into the International Bluegrass Music Association's Hall of Honor. At age seventy-two, he still regularly performs with his band, the Sunny Mountain Boys. Yet the man himself remains an obscure figure, compared with other bluegrass greats like Ralph Stanley or the Osborne Brothers. Fiction writer and music critic Tom Piazza couldn't understand why Martin wasn't better known. So, on assignment from the Oxford American magazine, he drove from his home in New Orleans to Nashville to find out. Although aware that Martin had "a reputation as a heavy drinker and a volatile personality," Piazza found himself pitched headlong into a world he couldn't have anticipated. Martin's mercurial personality drew the writer into a series of escalating encounters (with mean dogs, broken down cars, and near electrocution), culminating in a harrowing and unforgettable expedition, with Martin, to the Grand Ole Opry.

Piazza captured his visit with Martin in supple, electric prose, and the result, when it appeared in the Oxford American, quickly became a word-of-mouth sensation among musicians and fans alike. Included in this keepsake edition are a new afterword by Piazza, an essay on Martin's recordings, and a timeline of Martin's career.

True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass is a funny, scary, and powerfully poignant portrait of one of the living legends of American music.

Co-published with the Country Music Foundation Press

About this title

About the Author

Tom Piazza's writing on American music has appeared in the Sunday New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The Village Voice. He is the author of The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (University of Iowa Press), which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for music writing, and Blues and Trouble (St. Martin's Press), which won a James Michener award for fiction. He lives in New Orleans and is working on a novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Somewhere along the way, moonshine and dynamite collided. The result is the musical genius and three-chord scholar named Jimmy Martin. Baptized in the same fire that gave us Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, this reigning King of Bluegrass is no doubt a charter member of the elite fraternity of southern musicians that helped forge what the world now knows as bluegrass, rockabilly, country, and rock 'n' roll music. . . . He's part preacher, part prophet, and a card carrying madman who is completely filled with the musical holy ghost. Time spent with the King of Bluegrass is not for the lily-livered or the faint of heart."-Marty Stuart, from the Foreword

Edition details

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0826513603
• ISBN 13: 9780826513601
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 108