Henry Carrigan

Texas historian Joe Nick Patoski sums up the experience of attending one of Willie Nelson’s annual picnics as “living inside a Willie Nelson song every Fourth of July.” As Patoski writes in his foreword to journalist Dave Dalton Thomas’ Picnic: Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Tradition (Texas A&

In 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival celebrated the lives and music of a group of fictional street singers Willy and the Poor Boys in their hit song “Down on the Corner.” As the four boys gather on the corner near suppertime, there’s a “happy noise” as they try “to bring

There is a sense in which this book should not need to be written. Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson, Mother Maybelle Carter, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, among others, are the fount of the blues, jazz, gospel, country, and rock. So the title of this book gets it just right: