Barbara Martin Stephens, groundbreaking female booking agent and artist manager during the early days in Nashville, and ex-wife of enduring bluegrass icon Jimmy Martin, has released a second book.
Titled The People and the Music – Country and Bluegrass That Is!, the book continues in the first-person memoir style of her previous volume, Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler: My Life with Jimmy Martin, the King of Bluegrass, but expanding to recall the many people with whom she worked starting in the 1960s in Music City.
Barbara breaks it down into three primary categories: Booking Agents, Managers, and Promoters, in which she discusses ten different agencies or agents with whom she worked closely, including her own; The Women Behind The Scenes, which includes memories of people like Betty Harford, wife of John Hartford; and Singers, Songwriters, and More, with 16 profiles of people on the artistic side of the business, like Ronnie Reno, Ginger Boatwright, Louisa Branscomb, Grant Turner, Wilma Lee Cooper, Merle Kilgore, and both Bob and Birdie Smith and Marty and Charmaine Lanham, who helped launch The Station Inn.
The People and the Music retains the easy, conversational style which Stephens established in her first book, making her rich memories of these formative years in bluegrass and country music accessible to all. If you ever wished you could have been backstage at The Ryman while Jim Reeves or The Osbornes Brothers were on stage, this collection will get you as close as can be.
The book closes with an epilogue titled My Memories of Three of the Greatest Banjo Players: Sonny Osborne, Bill Emerson, and J.D. Crowe, whose headline perfectly describes the contents, a poem Stephens composed, and a number of her favorite recipes.
Running to 347 numbered pages, The People and the Musicar is like spending an afternoon with Barbara Martin Stephens, and absorbing her many memories and stories from working on the inside of the music business as it was developing in Nashville. It’s a deep dive into another time, with more than 100 historic photographs.
The self-published book is available from many popular online resellers, in both soft cover and digital editions.
