Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville

Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville

by Bruce Feiler
Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville

Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville

by Bruce Feiler

Paperback

$14.95 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Friday, March 22
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

Country music has exploded across the U.S. and undergone a sweeping revolution, transforming the once ridiculed world of Nashville into an unlikely focal point of American pop culture. Bruce Feiler was granted unprecedented access to the private moments of the revolution. Here is the acclaimed report: a chronicle of the genre's biggest stars as they change the face of American music.

From the historic stage of the Grand Ole Opry to the dim light of a recording studio, here is a ruggedly authentic behind the scenes tour that takes you places outsiders have never been allowed to go. Part social history, part backstage pass, this penetrating and graceful book presents the most comprehensive portraits yet painted of Garth Brooks and Wynonna Judd-two of the most celebrated artists of our times-as well as a touching picture of Wade Hayes, a young man who hopes to follow them to the exalted heights of one of America's richest traditions: the world of country music.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780380794706
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 04/06/1999
Series: Harper Perennial
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 855,825
Product dimensions: 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Bruce Feiler is the author of six consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including Abraham, Where God Was Born, America's Prophet, The Council of Dads, and The Secrets of Happy Families. He is a columnist for the New York Times, a popular lecturer, and a frequent commentator on radio and television. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and twin daughters.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

October 25, 1964

Place of Birth:

Savannah, Georgia

Education:

B.A., Yale University, 1987; M.Phil. in international relations, Cambridge University, 1991

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The sheets of rain were falling so hard and the rush of headlights was so expectant that it was easy to miss the cloverleaf exit that banks hard to the east off Briley Parkway and deposits the driver right into the heart of what the neon hails as MUSIC VALLEY. U.S.A. Turn here for Shoney's. There for Cracker Barrel. You don't even have to turn at all to veer into the WORLD-FAMOUS NASHVILLE PALACE, which appears to be a Denny's with an overly ambitious Vegas Strip sign attached. All these establishments, with their blinkety beacons and boppity billboards promising extra-fluffy biscuits and the BEST CATFISH ANYWHERE!, are to the east off McGavock Pike, which itself is ten miles east of downtown Music City, not far from the blue-collar outposts of town, and just up the road from the real countryside. In short, in the middle of nowhere. A fine place to recreate a small corner of Everywhere, circa Anytime at all.

WELCOME TO OPRYLAND. U.S.A. TURN RIGHT FOR THE MAGNOLIA LOBBY.

LEFT FOR OLD HICKORY LOUNGE.

Unlike the ones across the street, these signs are written in soothing script. They are painted in white on handsome red boards that remind you of fairy-tale wholesomeness. And they unfold before the driver's eyes on a faux country tableau of fluffy green grass, a white picket fence, and dozens of sculpted storybook trees wrapped in thousands of twinkling lights. On this night, uncommonly cold and rainy, the normally idyllic entrance to the Opryland Hotel, with its churchlike steeples, plantationlike columns, and county courthouselike red brick grandeur, has been overtaken by an even more idyllic constellation of candy cane light polesand plush fir wreaths in a holiday vision out of Currier and Ives. Even the guardhouse has been rebaked as a two-story peach-colored gingerbread house complete with giant plastic gumdrops and bouncing marshmallow ladies who wave at every car that makes it through the valley and into the parking lot of Gaylord s fantasy: WELCOME TO A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS. ALL SELF PARKING $4.00

Gaylord, in this instance, is Edward Gaylord, the Walt Disney of Southern culture and the aging, legendarily frugal proprietor of Gaylord Entertainment Co., which controls the dominant institutions in country music, the Opryland Hotel, Opryland Theme Park, CMT, TNN, and the gemstone in this hillbilly tiara, the Grand Ole Opry itself. All of these he has gathered in a 406-acre entertainment complex that draws visitors to an undistinguished plot of land not far from the airport with the paradoxical promise of unimagined wonder and old-fashioned small-town wholesomeness. Ironically, the hotel alone is larger than many small towns. With 2,870 rooms—the seventh-largest in the country and the largest outside Las Vegas—the hotel is an air-conditioned biosphere cum-theme park complete with giant murals, dancing fountains, and a 6-acre, glass-covered interiorscape with over ten thousand tropical plants. The newest extension, known as "The Delta," has a fifteen-story-high glass dome covering 4.5 acres and featuring a 110-foot-wide waterfall and a quarter-mile-long "river." Move over, Mickey Mouse. Tom Sawyer is the new American icon here, and he has gone uptown.

Driving around the facility (24 MPH SPEED LIMIT), past the Conservatory, alongside the Cascades, under several neo-Georgian overhangs, I finally arrive ten minutes later at the backdoor entrance to a modest, unornate, redbrick theater that since 1974 has been home to America's most beloved radio show, the Holy See of Country Music, the Grand Ole Opry.

"Hi. May I have your name please, sir . . . ?" The officer retrieves a portable stop sign that has blown over in the wind.

"And who are you here with . . . ?" He starts flipping through his clipboard.

"Ah, well, Mr. Brooks is expecting you. He's not here yet. Just drive up to the canopy and park wherever you can. The show starts in about an hour."

The Grand Ole Opry is as old as country music itself and is one of the few institutions in American life to survive the transition from radio to television to global satellite intimacy. Begun in November 1925 as one of a burgeoning breed of down-home variety shows popping up on newly formed commercial radio stations, the "WSM Barn Dance" was simply a marketing tool for the National Life and Accident Insurance Company to sell products to rural listeners. Broadcast from the studios of clear-channel WSM-AM (an acronym for the company's slogan, "We Shield Millions"), the show mixed banjos, fiddles, harmonicas, and string bands, along with homespun advertisements and a flamboyant host, George D. Hay, the "Solemn Old Judge." It was Hay, in 1927, who gave the show its indelible name when he followed a network broadcast of opera classics by saying, "You've been up in the clouds with Grand Opera, now get down to earth with us in a performance of Grand Ole Opry." It's never missed a weekend since, moving to the legendary Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville in 1943, and then decamping to its current suburban roost in 1974.

Since moving to the suburbs, though, the Opry has lost much of its clout. Garth Brooks, like many new stars, may identify his induction into the elite cast of seventy-five performing Opry "members" as the highlight of his career (a position that is wise marketing, if nothing else), but his career no longer depends on the Opry. Simply put, he has outgrown it. As a result, it was something of a surprise that Garth chose the Opry this night—just a month after the much-heralded release of his new album, Fresh Horses and still a month before his gaff at the American Music Awards—to break his year-long hiatus from public view. Under the circumstances, it was clearly designed to send a message. Having flirted with rock'n'roll for years, Garth had long been viewed with suspicion among some traditional country fans....

Dreaming Out Loud. Copyright © by Bruce Feiler. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

What People are Saying About This

Chet Flippo

“One of the best books about country music to appear in years.”

Elvis Mitchell

“Penetrating and insightful...Bruce Feiler’s DREAMING OUT LOUD details the ins and outs of Nashville.”

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews