Showing results by publisher "Simon & Schuster Audio" in History & Criticism

By the early 1960s nearly everybody paying attention to country music agreed that George Jones was the greatest country singer of all time. After taking honky-tonk rockers like “White Lightning” all the way up the country charts, he revealed himself to be an unmatched virtuoso on “She Thinks I Still Care,” thus cementing his status as a living legend. That’s where the trouble started.

In this widely praised book, Annik LaFarge presents a very different Frédéric Chopin from the melancholy, sickly, Romantic figure that has predominated for so long. The artist she discovered is, instead, a purely independent - and endlessly relevant - spirit: an innovator who created a new musical language; an autodidact who became a spiritually generous, trailblazing teacher; a stalwart patriot during a time of revolution, pandemic, and exile.

Released in 1998, Lauryn Hill’s first solo album is often cited by music critics as one of the most important recordings in modern history. Artists from Beyoncé to Nicki Minaj have claimed it as an inspiration, and it was recently included in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress, as well as named the second greatest album by a woman in history by NPR (right behind Joni Mitchell’s Blue). Award-winning feminist author and journalist Joan Morgan delivers an expansive, in-depth, and heartfelt analysis of the album and its enduring place in pop culture.

Spanning three decades worth of astute, acerbic, and overall astounding music writing, Kick Out the Jams is the first large-scale anthology of the work of renowned critic Dave Marsh. Ranging from Elvis Presley to Kurt Cobain, from Nina Simone to Ani DiFranco, from the Beatles to Green Day, the book gives an opinionated, eye-opening overview of 20th-century popular music—offering a portrait not just of an era but of a writer wrestling with the American empire.