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Ask guitar players about their instruments, and you’re likely to get a story—where the guitar came from, or what makes it unique, or why the player will never part with it. Most guitarists have strong feelings about their primary tool, and some are downright passionate about their axes. Chuck Holley is a professional photographer and writer who loves music and listening to musicians talk about their trade. For several years, he has been photographing guitarists with their prized instruments and collecting their stories. This beautifully illustrated book presents these stories in revelatory photographs and words.

The guitarists included in this book range from high-profile performers, including Rosanne Cash, Guy Clark, Laurence Juber, Jorma Kaukonen, JD Souther, Bill Frisell, Dave Alvin, and Kelly Willis, to renowned studio musicians and band members. Holley’s beautifully composed photographs portray them with their favorite guitar, including detail shots of the instrument. Accompanying the photographs are the musicians’ stories about the Gibsons, Fenders, Martins, and others that have become the guitar in their lives, the one that has a special lineage or intangible qualities of sustain, tone, clarity, and comfort that make it irreplaceable. Several musicians talk about how the guitar chose them, while others recount stories of guitars lost or stolen and then serendipitously recovered. Together, these photographs and stories underscore the great pleasure of performing with an instrument that’s become a trusted friend with a personality all its own.

The coming-of-age story of a master musician in mid-twentieth century colonial Rhodesia as he learns his community’s most cherished art, all while navigating profound social transformation.
 
Ethnomusicologist Paul F. Berliner has been studying Zimbabwean mbira for more than fifty years. When he first arrived in what was then Rhodesia after the nation declared independence from the United Kingdom, he met Cosmas Magaya, a mbira player who would become his teacher and lifelong collaborator. A Prodigy’s Calling chronicles the early years of Magaya’s life, documenting the master mbira player’s journey from child prodigy to established expert. As a child, Magaya was immersed in mbira music through his father’s work as a healer and spirit medium. As Magaya grew, so too did his world; his performances extended beyond the family compound as his skill and knowledge increased, bringing him into contact with a society fraught with decolonial conflict.
 
Following Magaya’s childhood, readers will learn how his upbringing guided his journey through the community’s social networks and how his early sensibilities, proclivities, and talents shaped his development. At the same time, his deepening engagement with music and the ancestors was affected by overlapping tensions between Shona cosmology and Christian ideology, rural and urban lifestyles, and the escalating African nationalist struggle and the white supremacist state. While Magaya’s story reflects profound social changes in the nation, it is also a story of musical apprenticeship. Readers following Magaya’s discovery of ever finer details in the music’s richly layered patterns will enhance their ability to hear mbira music’s forms, variations, and sonic qualities. Linocut illustrations by South African artist Lucas Bambo bring the narrative to life, and Berliner’s spirited storytelling is accompanied by QR codes that take readers directly to recordings of music as Magaya learns it. Appendices for musicians interested in learning or improving their mbira playing complement the story of Magaya’s early life. Inviting the reader into the very tradition it recounts, the book offers intimate insights into the relationships among music, Shona cosmology, and colonial politics in everyday life.
 

In this novel, written by the esteemed novelist in 1901, a provincial composer and organist from Croatia struggles to find his way along the perilous frontier between the worlds of artistic vocation and humdrum family life. The local kapellmeister—-a Czech, in good Habsburg tradition, and a confidant of Gaj and Palacky, influential politicians of the time—-recognizes young Amadej Zlatanic as a prodigy and persuades the stingy mayor and stubborn parish priest to pack the teenager off to the conservatory in Prague. After several years of sordid student purgatory, Amadej returns to Croatia—-ready for love and ready to make great art.The world of Central Europe in the 1860s flows past, and Amadej tries to keep abreast of political change. At the same time he ducks and dodges predatory relatives and townspeople in his native district, to which he has returned for the sake of employment. Despite his marriage to the impressionable and vulnerable local beauty, Adelka, and his devotion to their daughter Veruska, Amadej is sorely troubled by the political corruption and isolation of Croatia. His wife takes ill and his family is poor. Yet ultimately it is the vulgar, populist notion of Croatian "identity"—-symbolized by the worship of the tamburica, a local musical instrument—-that crushes Amadej's career. As it does so, he contemplates the two worlds of national greatness, amidst the Croatian national awakening, and international fame. Finally, frustrated beyond relief by unsuccessful affairs both amorous and professional, and tortured by the philistinism surrounding him, Amadej leaves the world of sanity for a mind-blowing descent into the maniacal and inescapable world of hallucination, paganism, and paranoia.

From country and blues to rap and punk, Texas music is all over the map, figuratively and literally. Texas musicians have pioneered new musical genres, instruments, and playing styles, proving themselves to be daring innovators who often call the tune for musicians around the country and even abroad. To introduce some of these trailblazing Texas musicians to a wider audience and pay tribute to their accomplishments, Michael Corcoran profiles thirty-two of them in All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music.

Corcoran covers musicians who work in a wide range of musical genres, including blues, gospel, country, rap, indie rock, pop, Cajun, Tejano, conjunto, funk, honky-tonk, rockabilly, rhythm and blues, and Western swing. His focus is on underappreciated artists, pioneers who haven't fully received their due. He also includes well-known musicians who've been underrated, such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Selena, and invites us to take a closer look at the unique talents of these artists. Corcoran's profiles come from articles he wrote for the Dallas Morning News, Austin American-Statesman, Houston Press, and other publications, which have been expanded and updated for this volume. His musical detective work even uncovers a case of mistaken identity (Washington Phillips) and corrects much misinformation on Blind Willie Johnson and Arizona Dranes. Corcoran closes the book with lively pieces on the Austin music scene and its most famous, if no longer extant, clubs, as well as his personal lists of the forty greatest Texas songs of all time and the twenty-five essential CDs for Texas music fans.

Americana Portrait Sessions is the first photography book to take a comprehensive view of contemporary Americana music. The collection features intimate portraits that reveal the strength, heart, and soul of nearly two hundred great artists from the big tent that is Americana music, all shot through the expert lens of Jeff Fasano.

Fasano's unparalleled access to Americana artists like Sheryl Crow, Rhiannon Giddens, Vince Gill, Keb' Mo', Judy Collins, John Oates, The Avett Brothers, The McCrary Sisters, Lucinda Williams, Margo Price, Blind Boys of Alabama, and Kris Kristofferson gives Americana Portrait Sessions the kind of authority that comes from true reach into the breadth of the genre. But this collection is as important for the artists few fans know as for the ones with successful careers behind them. While the book champions the diversity of race, gender, sexuality, and age inherent in Americana music, it also spans career arcs to bring lesser-known acts into the spotlight.

Americana Portrait Sessions brings you backstage to the greenrooms and quiet corners where artists like The War and Treaty, Jewel, Jason Isbell, and The Wooten Brothers aren't just artists performing, but people hanging out.

Native to a high valley in the Andes of Ecuador, the Otavalos are an indigenous people whose handcrafted textiles and traditional music are now sold in countries around the globe. Known as weavers and merchants since pre-Inca times, Otavalos today live and work in over thirty countries on six continents, while hosting more than 145,000 tourists annually at their Saturday market.

In this ethnography of the globalization process, Lynn A. Meisch looks at how participation in the global economy has affected Otavalo identity and culture since the 1970s. Drawing on nearly thirty years of fieldwork, she covers many areas of Otavalo life, including the development of weaving and music as business enterprises, the increase in tourism to Otavalo, the diaspora of Otavalo merchants and musicians around the world, changing social relations at home, the growth of indigenous political power, and current debates within the Otavalo community over preserving cultural identity in the face of globalization and transnational migration. Refuting the belief that contact with the wider world inevitably destroys indigenous societies, Meisch demonstrates that Otavalos are preserving many features of their culture while adopting and adapting modern technologies and practices they find useful.