Autumn Rhythm

Lost Highway: The True Story of Country Music

by Colin Escott
Smithsonian Institution Press, 192 pp., $26.95
Based on the acclaimed four-part BBC miniseries recently aired stateside on Trio, Lost Highway offers a concise and engaging overview of country music's history.

Utilizing a linear narrative and lots of good photos, the book takes the reader on a full-circle journey from the dramatically tweaked European folksongs of late 19th-century Appalachia to the "rediscovery" of "real" country music via the O Brother soundtrack.

Don't dive in expecting the exhaustive research of a Peter Guralnick book, however. Lost Highway barrels through country music history like a straight shot on an interstate highway, bypassing minutiae on its way to the big picture. Colin Escott discusses country's evolution in terms of sea changes, including the mass production of the phonograph, the post-Prohibition explosion of honky-tonks, and the emergence of radio barn-dance shows like The Grand Ole Opry as star-making vehicles.

While the Opry was responsible for Nashville becoming the epicenter for post-World War II country music, Escott points out that the first radio barn dance actually aired in 1923 on Fort Worth's WBAP. If this connect-the-milestones approach results in some oversimplification, it also helps highlight recurring themes.

Escott's main thesis is that country lost its "strangeness and its soul" in pursuit of the masses during the Nineties, but he also rattles off a litany of previous identity crises weathered by country music well before Garth Brooks flew around Texas Stadium like Peter Pan. This theme manifests itself brilliantly in the image of Charlie Rich burning the envelope announcing John Denver as entertainer of the year at the 1975 Country Music Awards -- just one of many stirring photos, some never before published.

Escott's history pits the conservative Nashville hegemony against the loyal opposition of Sun Records, Bakersfield, the outlaw movement, and even alternative country, the latter coming through at the last minute to save the former from its own bloat. While any all-encompassing history can wobble under rigid scrutiny, this is indeed the "true story" of country music.