Books published by publisher Faber Music Ltd

Tracing some of the early influences of what is now considered country music, this book is a description of a cultural journey to the backroads, rural knolls and railway-crossing towns of Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina and Virginia. The author sets out to show how the first practitioners' music, from the 1930s the 1960s, came to express the rural nostalgia and experience of dislocation that millions of Southern working-class Americans felt as they were forced by the Depression, the dust bowl, urban industrialization and the war, to find new jobs, new homes and new lives. The book includes portraits of leading country performers such as Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Merle Haggard and Chet Atkins.

Since its premiere in 1885 at the Savoy Theatre in London, The Mikado (or The Town of Titipu) has become one of the most-performed pieces of musical theatre in history. As with many of Gilbert and Sullivan's productions, the show satirizes aspects of Victorian Britain's politics and aristocracy; in The Mikado, however, the duo cleverly cloaked these criticisms behind a charming story set not in Britain, but in exotic Japan.