Gayden wren biography
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Reading Country Music - by Gayden Wren
It’s a long way from New York to Nashville, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Grand Ole Opry. For armchair travelers, though, it’s a short trip. The Society Library’s collection includes a number of books about country music and country musicians. Here’s a sampling, reviewed by Gayden Wren. A list of further reading follows Gayden's selections.
Cash: The Autobiography, by Johnny Cash (Harper, ).
Cash wrote two autobiographies, covering largely the same ground; the other was Man in Black: His Own Story in His Own Words (Zondervan, ). This is one is the more thorough and generally the more accurate. It’s heavily slanted toward where the year-old Cash was in his life at this point, which means that you shouldn’t look here for much that’s unfavorable to his second wife, June Carter Cash, or more than grudgingly favorable to his first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash. However, by this point Cash was a devout Christian and very conscious of his own mortality, and he’s unsparing toward himself. The book is loosely organized and sometimes the chronology is hard to track, but it’s worth reading.
Hank Williams: The Biography, by Colin Escott (Little, Brown, ).
Escott, one of the best living country-music scholars, delivers what remains the d
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Live and on record
Well, to begin with, his name isn&#;t Walt and he isn&#;t from Tennessee.
Born in , Gayden Wren has been a journalist since the s and a member of the New York theatrical community since the s. He recently marked his 40th year as a member of the Gilbert & Sullivan Light Opera Company of Long Island. He is also a journalist and editor.
Growing up in New York City in the s and s, it wasn&#;t easy to develop a taste for country music, and indeed he didn&#;t. Though his mother &#; who had grown up in the tiny north-woods town of Atlanta, Mich. &#; was a fan and a regular listener to country station WHN, Wren&#;s taste ran to contemporary rock &#;n&#; roll (Beatles more than Stones), Broadway and, of course, the comic operas of Gilbert & Sullivan. When he emerged as a songwriter in the early s, it was primarily as a lyricist for musical comedies and the seminal Christmas-rock band Bah and the Humbugs.
As recently as the beginning of , had you asked him, Wren would have told you that he didn&#;t know much about country music and what he did know he didn&#;t like.
In early , however, Wren began a four-year sabbatical from his real life to care for his mother, who was in the late stages of Alzheimer&#;s disease. To get her to sit still long enough for hi