Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost. By Tony Russell. New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. ISBN-13 9780195325096. Hardcover. pp. xviii, 258. $29.95.


With his Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost, Tony Russell provides an excellent reference source that examines 110 artists who contributed much to the birth, growth, and development of early commercial country music. The author gives special attention to artists who have been forgotten or omitted by music historians and whose careers peaked during the first half of the twentieth century. Country Music Originals consists of brief entries, each averaging one to two pages, on selected artists, supported by a variety of accompanying visuals, including black-and-white photographs, concert advertisements, promotional materials by record labels, newspaper clippings, and selected discographies of accessible original recordings, compilations, and reissues. The volume's entries are ordered somewhat chronologically, and the author includes four "bridge" sections that examine context-specific issues such as the cultural contrast between Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in the late 1920s, pre- versus post- Depression country music style and reception, the influence of radio in the 1930s and 1940s, and the distinctions between Western swing and honky-tonk.