Search results for ""Author Peter Cooper""

Renowned for its versatility, the piano has played a major role both in musical development and in the shaping of public taste. Throughout its history it has always remained at the centre of the music scene as the composer’s tool, the virtuoso’s partner and the accompanist’s mainstay. Style in Piano Playing is a book not only about the piano, its uses and performers, but also about the music written for the piano. In it, the author shows how the great pianists of the past built their programmes, tells of how they were received and takes a critical look at the history of musical taste.

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Peter Guralnick, dean of rock-and roll-storytellers, writes in the introduction to Johnny’s Cash & Charley’s Pride, “Peter Cooper has always been in the mix.” Whether spending time with Johnny Cash or Kris Kristofferson, playing bass for Loretta Lynn, discussing songwriting with Taylor Swift, or introducing the Grateful Dead’s Robert Hunter to Porter Wagoner, Peter Cooper has continually found himself in the presence of music royalty and the recipient of countless intimate conversations, asides, and confidences. In Johnny’s Cash & Charley’s Pride: Lasting Legends and Untold Adventures in Country Music, Cooper chronicles his many “in the mix” tales since arriving in Nashville in 2000 to cover the country music scene for the Tennessean. Filled with untold stories and newly revealed histories, it is an informal yet well-studied inside view of country music’s greatest characters and pivotal moments. Now a senior director at the Country Music Hall of Fame, Cooper’s stories are akin to a curated behind-the-scenes tour of country music. Spanning nineteen chapters, Cooper offers an original take on the formative days at WSM and engaging introductions to an ensemble cast of country music’s icons, quirks, and golden-but-hidden personalities. With a gem on every page, Cooper has crafted a perceptive, smiling, and atypical immersion into the world of country music that will keep any music fan engaged with its wit, passion, and authenticity.

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He didn’t know it at the time, but Tim Ghianni’s love affair with Nashville and its musical artists began on a steamy night in 1972, when the twenty-year-old author had unsolicited help from honky-tonkin’ legends Bobby Bare and Shel Silverstein during an after-midnight “salvation” of the city. It was the beginning of a lifelong urban romance that Ghianni would pursue during a career as a journalist in middle Tennessee, interviewing Nashville’s biggest stars and developing friendships with musicians of all kinds.Pilgrims, Pickers & Honky-Tonk Heroes is Tim Ghianni’s love letter and nostalgic swan song, recounting the storied musical history of Nashville as well as the dramatic changes the city has seen over the course of fifty years. The Nashville of today—with one hundred newcomers a day from places like Los Angeles and New York and fresh waves of musicians making up a new modern soundtrack—is not the same city he made his home in 1972, for better and for worse.Time changes everything, even a beloved American city, but this briskly told and warmly remembered book recounts the countless friends, adventures, and anecdotes that capture the essence of Music City across a half-century.

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