This is the ultimate book for classical music record geeks. Imagine John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity obsessing about Wagner’s Ring instead of the Velvet Underground, and you’ll have an idea of the passion with which British music critic Norman Lebrecht details the century-long decline and fall of the classical recording industry. The Life and Death of Classical Music is a sad and sordid tale in other words, a real page-turner. Lebrecht does not hold back from expressing his Old-Testament-prophet horror over the unholy marriage between art and commerce. His lament is all the more lyrical because of his comprehensive grasp of the social and political context in which the quality of classical music recordings waxed (vinyled?) and waned. It’s bad enough to know that von Karajan’s recording career flourished under the Nazis; to learn, however, that the label Deutsche Grammophon employed slave labor during the war (including inmates from Auschwitz) to press those von Karajan recordings is enough to make you want to pull those old DG LP’s off your dusty shelf and smash them.

There’s something gleefully perverse about a book that hopes to sell by kvetching about how its subject won’t sell anymore. Lebrecht loves the recordings he loves, but he loves hating the recordings he hates even more. That’s one sublime geek.

Michael Alec Rose is an associate professor of composition at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

In the beautifully illustrated and elaborate Will The Circle Be Unbroken: Country Music in America, co-published by The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, editors Paul Kingsbury and Alanna Nash aim for both scope and specificity. Though they devote considerable space to the commercial aspects of the genre, the book’s expert contributors (including BookPage reviewer Ed Morris) also evaluate and ponder artistic issues and controversies. They contrast country’s broad idiomatic frontiers with the often more rigid tastes, interests and opinions of its core constituency (the white working class) and provide details about country’s recording practices, hit records and most popular artists. With stunning photographs and reflections by country superstars, this is a work that won’t alienate scholars or intimidate novices or general fans.

Colin Escott’s The Grand Ole Opry: The Making of an American Icon will find particular favor among those who already know something of the Opry’s history but who want some inside glimpses into the venerable radio show, now in its 81st year. Escott, who is best known for his writings on Hank Williams, divides his book by decades, opening each chapter with a list of the performers who joined the Opry during that 10-year period.

Instead of providing a detailed narrative of how the Opry evolved and what the internal politics were, Escott assembles quotations from people who observed or participated in that evolution. He draws primarily on the Opry’s own massive archives for material and liberally seeds the printed word with publicity photos and newspaper clippings. The effect is to draw the reader into the warm and occasionally cantankerous backstage milieu. Here’s how comedienne Minnie Pearl, who joined the Opry in 1940, described the show’s rampant informality: At first, I was horrified by the seeming disorganization. I had come from directing plays. On the Opry, it wasn’t unusual for an announcer to say, And now we’re proud to present so-and-so,’ and someone would whisper, He ain’t here, he’s gone to get a sandwich,’ which didn’t fluster the emcee, who’d say, Oh well, he’ll be back in a minute. Meanwhile, let’s hear from the Fruit Jar Drinkers.’ Edward Morris is the former country music editor of Billboard and currently a contributor to CMT.com.

Thumbing through Richard Carlin’s  Country Music: The People, Places, and Moments that Shaped the Country Sound  is a lot like strolling through the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. The 500 or so photos arrayed on the book’s pages are big and bold and cover every aspect of the music: instruments; album, songbook and sheet music covers; candid and promotional shots; and movie and video stills. Carlin is a respected scholar. His text and annotations cover country music from its Civil War prehistory to such current stars as Rascal Flatts, Sugarland and Dierks Bentley (who also happens to be the newest member of the Grand Ole Opry). Spotted throughout the text are delightful thumbnail commentaries and not always kind ones on Country Classics, ranging from Home on the Range to Skin (Sarabeth). Photographer Raeanne Rubenstein provided many of the more recent photos.

Edward Morris is the former country music editor of Billboard and currently a contributor to CMT.com.

Eugene Robinson, an editor and former reporter for the Washington Post, views Cuba’s history and post-Revolutionary politics through its many kinds of music in Last Dance In Havana. While this approach may not satisfy scholars, it does have a lot to recommend it. After all, the arts are a barometer of what a society values, subsidizes, permits and turns to in times of crisis. Thanks to the international success of 1997’s The Buena Vista Social Club CD, a project that resurrected a group of old and once-neglected native performers, Cuban music was suddenly all the rage. This fascination brought yet another tentacle of capitalism to the country and widened the general interest in other varieties of popular music. Robinson is at pains to trace them all: he visits nightclubs and musician’s homes, inspects Cuba’s world-class music academies and demonstrates how Castro’s seemingly capricious rules affect the ebb and flow of music. Robinson, who is black, also describes the racism that still afflicts this supposedly egalitarian society.

Still, he is not cynical about Castro’s motives. “He saw a Cuba of heroic sacrifice and complete selflessness, a state that came as close as possible to attaining the communist ideal, a land where bourgeois comforts’ were rightly scorned and private ownership’ was a concept consigned to history’s dustbin and constant struggle’ was the happiest condition of all. . . . I think that when Fidel looks at the glorious shambles that is Cuba, he sees success, not failure.”

It can be fairly argued that only three rock icons from the hippy-dippy ’60s have really endured: Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Neil Young, who is the subject of the massive, keenly detailed and anecdote-laden authorized biography Shakey.

With style and intelligence, veteran music journalist Jimmy McDonough tells the amazing tale of Young’s emergence from the Canadian folkie scene into the wild post-Beatles, pre-psychedelic mayhem of mid-1960s L.A., where he first made his mark as a member of the legendary (and legendarily dysfunctional) pop-rock group Buffalo Springfield. Hailed as a songwriter of genius, Young struggled a bit thereafter, mostly in the face of criticism of his reedy, strangely iconoclastic vocal stylings. Yet a string of groundbreaking solo albums Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Harvest were followed by a highly publicized stint as a member of the acclaimed Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and superstardom was his, with all the attendant professional madness and personal heartache. While most of Young’s contemporaries dropped off the industry road map due to natural attrition, he continued to produce music through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, building new audiences and maintaining a touring presence while also retooling his act through seemingly unlikely alliances with bands such as Devo and Pearl Jam.

McDonough’s analysis of Young’s musical vision and brilliance is matched with fascinating insights into the life of a man who has certainly experienced his share of physical and psychic pain his parents’ early breakup, childhood polio, extended bouts with epilepsy, failed relationships and marriages (including his very public liaison with actress Carrie Snodgrass), the premature deaths of musical friends from drug overdoses, and the birth of a son with cerebral palsy.

On the surface, Young has always been perceived as a somewhat frail, introspective and private individual. Yet, if nothing else, McDonough’s exhaustive, eminently readable account serves as testament to one man’s abilities to survive the dog-eat-dog music business and triumph through his art.

In the shadow of Clinch Mountain in Scott County, Virginia, lies what is called Poor Valley. Out of this hardscrabble environment emerged the legendary musical pioneers the Carter family. A.P. (Alvin Pleasant) Carter, his wife Sara and her cousin Maybelle sang and played their way to fame and fortune, creating in many ways the basis for the entire American traditional, folk and country music industries.

In Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, documentary filmmaker Mark Zwonitzer teams up with veteran journalist Charles Hirshberg to capture the historic lives of the Carters, from the moment they were discovered by music producer and publisher Ralph Peer in the 1920s, through their groundbreaking careers as recording artists, to their deaths in the late 1970s. In between is an incredible tale of poverty, sudden celebrity and wealth, seminal recording dates, national radio exposure to a country mired in the Great Depression, unceasing concert performances in towns both small and large, appearances on the Grand Ole Opry and associations with musical greats like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Chet Atkins, Roy Acuff and Elvis Presley.

There’s also an interesting profile of the young Johnny Cash, who eventually after a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth became daughter June’s third husband in the 1960s and has kept the family tradition going ever since. This volume is thoroughly researched, and the authors don’t stint on coverage of the Carter forebears, the details of their simple country life and the idiosyncrasies and squabbles that characterized, in particular, the lives of A.P. and Sara, who divorced fairly early on, yet continued working together for the sake of the music (and the money). The text paints intriguing portraits of all the major players but throws rays of especially revelatory light on A.P.’s brother Eck, who was not simply Mother Maybelle’s devoted husband but also a reliable and organized manager for his wife and a loving father to their singing daughters (June, Helen and Anita).

Music fans will be particularly fascinated with accounts of how A.P. in need of recording material scoured the countryside collecting folk and gospel songs from local citizens, tinkered with the words and melodies as necessary and then, innovator that he was (or scoundrel, depending on your point of view), parlayed his finds into copyrightable gems that netted him (and Peer) a king’s ransom in royalties. In the right place at the right time, the Carters brought to the world the spirit of Wildwood Flower, Keep on the Sunny Side and Will the Circle Be Unbroken, among many other classic tunes. This book is an essential work of musical Americana.

Aspiring musician Martin Brady writes on the arts.

You don’t have to remember the ’50s to get lost in Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with ’50s Pop Music. After all, author Karen Schoemer only barely does. Yet even as she wrote about modern, angst-heavy rock as a Newsweek staffer, shades of Fabian, Tommy Sands, Georgia Gibbs and, above all, Connie Francis, hovered alongside specters of her parents at the edge of her imagination, demanding the chance to reverse history’s merciless judgment.

And so Schoemer’s search is about more than music. As her breathless, ironic and engaging prose suggests, it’s about family no, actually, it’s about love. For 30 years her parents had lived a few miles apart yet barely acknowledged each other’s existence. Somehow this becomes just as important as her portraits of the stars that set the pre-boom tune. You sense this in the quick intimacy she establishes with these singers singers she had been raised to dismiss as irrelevant, empty of talent or just plain icky.

Schoemer hurls herself into their lives, like a whirlwind sucking up a sea of research factoids yet drowning in uncertainties. Invariably she sheds her cynicism and becomes a trusting believer, much like her parents must have been before their premonitions of divorce. She sits in the backseat as Patti Page and her husband drive through their tiny town, wondering if maybe she could stay and join their family. She perches on Pat Boone’s lap, ready to devote herself to him forever despite his purity. She stands on her chair and screams along with the happy geriatrics at a Frankie Laine concert.

In other words, Schoemer doesn’t write about this music and the people who made it: she lives it, and gets it tangled up in her daydreams and anger and innocence. And, almost without anyone noticing, her odyssey leads her to where her memory began not just into the home of Connie Francis but, wildly and improbably, into her bed, where a moment of terrifying revelation reminds us that even pop music at its worst packs enough magic to set us all free. Robert L. Doerschuk is a former editor of Musician magazine.