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Black with dried blood: Nick Tosches' Country book

"We got both kinds of music", goes the old joke , "country and western", and that's certainly true of Nick Tosches' book, Country: Living Legends And Dying Metaphors In America's Biggest Music (1977). Yeah, man, this book has certainly got both kinds of music, and plenty more too. Yee-haw . I ain't - it's fair to say - no big country music fan, but I happily saddled up and galloped through Tosches' book because earlier this year I thoroughly enjoyed his excellent book on Jerry Lee Lewis's rollercoaster life. Why? Because Tosches is a really entertaining writer and one who appears to have a genuine understanding of his subjects (we're not talking a gun-for-hire writer churning out middle-market stuff for the HMV books section). Tosches' thing is a brisk economy of style onto which he occasionally heaps bucket-loads of detail - a whole page listing records released in a certain period, or even a reproduction of a record company...

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