Country music dominates American radio. Evoking images of rural poverty and small-town morality, it has been marketed successfully to an eager international audience. This history of American country music tells the story of how country music developed as a commercial art form. The book takes the reader from Atlanta and Chicago, to Charlotte, Tulsa, and then to Hollywood, New York and Nashville, providing anecdotes about the genre's earliest performers: Fiddlin' John Carson, the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Patsy Montana, the Girls of the Golden West, Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb. It concludes with the man in whose image all future country stars were created, Hank Williams. Seeking to capture the freewheeling entrepreneurial spirit of the day, the book details the activities and importance of the key promoters who created country music's image.