Dayton Duncan – författare

The rich and colorful story of America''s most popular music and the singers and songwriters who have captivated, entertained, and consoled listeners from the 1920s to the 1990sThis gorgeously illustrated, hugely entertaining history of country music is based on the Ken Burns film for PBS. It begins with the music''s roots in the rural South where the music emerged from America itself--the songs people sang to themselves and their families, the hymns they sang in church, the fiddle music they danced to on Saturday nights. With the birth of radio in the 1920s, these songs from small towns, mountain hollers, and the wide-open West became the music of the entire nation: a diverse range of sounds and styles from honkytonk to spirituals to bluegrass to rockabilly, leading down through the decades to the music''s massive commercial success today. But above all, this is the story of the musicians. Here is Hank Williams'' honkytonk life, Dolly Parton''s rise to fame from a dirt-poor childhood, Loretta Lynn hand-selling her records while raising a family. Here too are interviews with everyone from Merle Haggard to Garth Brooks to Roseanne Cash. These stories will captivate longtime country fans, and introduce new listeners to this extraordinary body of music that lies at the very center of the American experience.

Suffering from a case of "road fever" brought on by prolonged exposure to the journals of Lewis and Clark, Dayton Duncan has retraced the Corps of Discovery's route from Saint Louis to the Pacific and back again four different times during the past twenty years—to say nothing of his countless additional trips to landmarks along their route. In sweltering summer heat and in temperatures 45 degrees below zero, he watched yellow moons rise and heard buffalo thunder; navigated against the Missouri River's relentless current and stood on its surface, frozen solid overnight; canoed a dozen times through Montana's magnificent White Cliffs (Lewis's "seens of visionary inchantment"); and read the journals by candlelight in the expedition's fort on the Pacific coast. Along the way, Duncan wrote the essays that make up this book, essays that guide the reader on a journey of discovery along the trail of Lewis and Clark. More a revisiting than a retelling of the story of the Corps of Discovery, Duncan's book reintroduces us to people and places along the trail, reflects on events large and small that occurred during the expedition, and offers constant—and constantly entertaining—insights into why, two centuries later, the saga of Lewis and Clark continues to exert such a powerful hold on our national imagination.

One hundred and eighty years after Lewis and Clark's "Voyage of Discovery" (1804–1806), Dayton Duncan set out in a Volkswagen camper to retrace their steps. Out West is an account of three separate journeys: Lewis and Clark's epic adventure through uncharted wilderness; Duncan's retracing of the historic trail, now in various ways tamed, paved, and settled; and the journey of the American West in the years in between. Readers traveling with Duncan will encounter the people who inhabit today's West: farmers and ranchers, cowboys and mountain men, Native Americans, residents of dying small towns, city dwellers who have survived cycles of boom and bust. From the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to the Oregon coast, readers will be treated to a landscape as variously impressive as its people.