From Girlie Action Roni Stoneman, Eddie Dean and more celebrate the release of PURE COUNTRY at The Bell House on Dec. 10th! Join us in celebration of PROCESS MEDIA's magnificent new book PURE COUNTRY: The Leon Kagarise Archives, 1961-1971. Process Books and Arthur Magazine invite you to the Bell House for a very special evening with Roni Stoneman, the First Lady of Banjo, along with the Jones Street Boys and the Tall Pines. Eddie Dean, who wrote the forward and the text of the book, will be narrating a slide show of images from the book of such country legends as George Jones, Kitty Wells, Johnny Cash, June Carter, Dolly Parton, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl amongst others. For more info http://www.girlieaction.com/purecountry/ (This evening is open to the public) XO - Felice and Deb @ Girlie ![]()
PURE COUNTRY
"What
Kagarise preserved was something extremely rare...live country music
from the ‘50s and ‘60s performed in its most natural setting." Throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, country music’s most legendary performers played backwoods stages in outdoor music parks, live and unfiltered. It was a time when Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and George Jones mingled up close with fans like kin at a mountain family reunion. These
dollar-a-carload picnic concerts might have been forgotten if it hadn’t
been for Leon Kagarise. An audio engineer by trade, he began recording
the live shows on reel-to-reel tape and shot hundreds of candid color
slides of the stars and their fans. Music
journalist Eddie Dean spent many hours interviewing Kagarise before his
death in early 2008. His introduction and accompanying text tells how
an obsession created a view into a lost world that challenges easy
assumptions about Country and reveals a secret history of Country music
in the ‘60s, when the industry largely turned its back on its rural
roots and produced a slick, studio-centric product known as the
Nashville Sound. Forced
into commercial exile, traditional country performers scratched out a
living in the outdoor-music park circuit, where Kagarise served as
their unofficial court photographer. With a meticulous and loving eye, Kagarise
captured dozens of classic country and bluegrass artists in their
prime, including June Carter, Dolly Parton, Bill Monroe, Hank Snow, The
Stanley Brothers, The Stonemans, and many others. Over a decade, he amassed an archive of over 600 color slides and 4,000 hours of pristine-sounding live performance as well as radio and television recordings, some of the only known surviving documents of the era. Pure Country
presents 140 of Kagarise’s stunning color images, most never seen in
print, from an archive now considered by historians to be one of the
richest discoveries in the history of American music. |
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