Barry Mazor
Contributor
Independent journalist, author, and editor. Author of Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America's Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century (2009) as well as numerous newspaper and journal articles on country music.
Primary Contributions (5)
Tom T. Hall was an American songwriter and entertainer, popularly known as the “Storyteller,” who expanded the stylistic and topical range of the country music idiom with plainspoken, highly literate, and often philosophical narratives. His songs were largely reflections of his own experiences,…
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Publications (2)
Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (November 2014)
This is the first biography of Ralph Peer, the adventurous—even revolutionary—A&R man and music publisher who saw the universal power locked in regional roots music and tapped it. It is the story of the life and fifty-year career—from the age of cylinder recordings to the stereo era—of the man who pioneered the recording, marketing, and publishing of blues, jazz, country, gospel, and Latin music. It tracks Peer's role in the recording of Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" (the record that...
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Meeting Jimmie Rodgers How America's Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century (April 2012)
In the nearly eight decades since his death at age thirty-five, singer-songwriter Jimmie Rodgers has been an inspiration for numerous top performers--from Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Hank Williams to Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Beck. How did this Mississippi-born vaudevillian, a former railroad worker who performed so briefly so long ago, come to be the model for how American roots music stars could become popular heroes? In Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, the first book to explore the...
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