In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of musicians including Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Tompall Glaser appeared in Nashville, ushering in a fresh musical sensibility that combined rock and folk with the rollicking rhythms of the Texas music of Doug Sahm. In 1976, Jennings, Nelson, Colter, and Glaser released the now-iconic Wanted: The Outlaws!, which became the first country album to sell a million copies. Streissguth's (Johnny Cash: The Biography) captivating tale of these artists, the ways in which they challenged the Nashville establishment of the time, and their sudden rise to fame provides a glimpse into a time when the country music industry, as well as Nashville itself, was struggling to find its identity. The remarkable moral of the story is that for a brief, and considerably memorable, moment, outsiders succeeded in finding a (sometimes uneasy) home in the Nashville scene in ways that artists have trouble doing today. VERDICT Although die-hard country music fans know the details of the stories that Streissguth tells, his book nevertheless opens a window on a Nashville that struggled to adapt to the times and the musicians who led it into a new era.
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