Backstaged: My 15 Years Behind the Scenes in Country Music

Go backstage with Alison Bonaguro for 15 years of her best stories about life as a country music journalist.

Bonaguro -- a country music fan first and an industry insider second -- is the only one who can take you behind the scenes to see what goes on when a country star isn't on stage. After spending much of her professional life having in-depth conversations with the stars you love, she's finally sharing the fascinating kinds of stories that didn't make it into her actual stories. The ones where she and Lee got kicked out of a Vegas bar, or when she got to know Blake Shelton in the lobby of a Holiday Inn, or how she almost died after a Luke Bryan interview, or the night she accidentally had dinner with Kid Rock, or shared Skinny Bitches with Miranda Lambert's parents, or walked inside the ropes with golfer John Daly, or got subpeonaed by Sara Evans' ex-husband, or the one about the living hell she went through when she dared to not love a Beyonce song. Those are just a few of the tales she has to tell after spending close to two decades making a living out of loving country music. No one else can tell these stories, because no one else has lived them and chronicled them quite like Bonaguro, who is a consistent and prolific voice within Nashville media circles.

What does it take to get backstage at a concert? And then stay there for 15 years? That's what Alison Bonaguro did as a country music journalist, and this memoir is all about it. She's written thousands of stories about the music and the people who make it, but these are some of her stories that never made it into her stories: things that happened backstage, on a tour bus, in a bar, at a Las Vegas pool, or out in a cornfield somewhere. After all these years behind the scenes as an insider, she considers herself beyond blessed to be making a living out of loving country music.