For five decades, as a singer, musician, songwriter, and producer, Tim O’Brien has ceaselessly explored the vast American musical landscape. While Appalachia and Ireland eventually became facets of the defining myth surrounding him and his music, he has digested a broad array of roots styles, reshaping them to his own purposes. Award-winning biographer Bobbie Malone and premier country music historian Bill C. Malone have teamed again, this time to chronicle O’Brien’s career and trace the a...

**" . . . Bobbie and Bill Malone secure the Riders’ rightful place in country music history, recounting the story of their remarkable journey, which simultaneously entertained millions of people and revived the venerable American tradition of the singing cowboy.”—Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, creators of PBS's Country Music**For almost five decades, the band known as Riders In The Sky (“America’s Favorite Cowboys”) has entertained and delighted audiences in Nashvill...

For generations of children, including a young Oprah Winfrey, opening a Lois Lenski book has meant opening a world. This was just what the author wanted: to help children “see beyond the rim of their own world.” In Lois Lenski: Storycatcher, historian and educator Bobbie Malone takes us into Lenski’s own world to tell the story of how a girl from a small Ohio town became a beloved literary icon.Author and illustrator of the Newbery Award–winning Strawberry Girl an...

“The story of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant is the story of towering artistic achievement wrapped in a love story so deep and so complete that the two are their own country song. Bobbie and Bill Malone are precisely the right match to tell this tale of love and genius.”—Ken Burns, Director, Country MusicYou might not know the names of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, but you know their music. Arriving in Nashville in 1950, the songwriting duo became the first fu...

What are some food favorites in Wisconsin, and why are they special to us? How have our landscape and the people who have inhabited it contributed to our food heritage? This unique blend of history book and cookbook gives kids a real taste for hands-on history by showing them how to create and sample foods that link us to the resources found in our state and the heritage of those who produce them.Designed for kids and adults to use together, The Flavor of Wisconsin for Kids

In this highly accessible history of ships and shipping on the Great Lakes, upper elementary readers are taken on a rip-roaring journey through the waterways of the upper Midwest.Great Ships on the Great Lakes explores the history of the region’s rivers, lakes, and inland seas—and the people and ships who navigated them. Read along as the first peoples paddle tributaries in birch bark canoes. Follow as European voyageurs pilot rivers and lakes to get beaver pelts back to the easter...

Willie Nelson shares his life story in this captivating bestselling memoir of true love, wild times, best friends, and barrooms."Unvarnished. Funny. Leaving no stone unturned." ... So say the publishers about this book I've written. What I say is that this is the story of my life, told as clear as a Texas sky and in the same rhythm that I lived it.It's a story of restlessness and the purity of the moment and living right. Of my childhood in Abbott, Texas, t...

Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who heralded a radical change in American culture and launched the first truly modern decade.The New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted.Flapper is an inside look at the 1920s. With tales of Coco ...

A musical tale of collegiate a cappella filled of high notes, high drama, and high jinks that inspired the hit films Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2.Get ready to be pitch slapped.The roots of unaccompanied vocal music stretch all the way back to Gregorian chants of the Middle Ages, and collegiate a cappella is over a century old. But what was once largely an Ivy League phenomenon has, in the past twenty years, exploded. And it’s not what...

"Refreshing . . . candid . . . poignant. . . . One of the best of country's tell-alls, as warm, peculiar, and individualistic as Jennings's music itself." — Entertainment WeeklyEqual parts outlaw, renegade, and legend, Waylon Jennings enjoyed a stellar music career for four decades and this no-holds-barred autobiography reveals the story of a man who infused country music traditions with the energy of rock and roll to rewrite the rules of ...

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary look at privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America by the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural criticJefferson takes us into an insular and discerning society: “I call it Negroland,” she writes, “because I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonders, glorious and terrible.”Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 into upper-crust black Chicago. Her father was head of pe...

A "richly anecdotal" account of the secluded LA neighborhood's legendary music scene, a tale of groupies, cocaine, and California dreaming ( Salon).Finalist, SCBA Book Award for NonfictionA Los Angeles Times BestsellerIn the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and ...