Greenville County

Iris Cooper has been singing ever since she can remember, hitting the high notes like no one else. When she is twelve, her father convinces the owner of a bar in Lake City, Texas, to let her perform, and she stuns the audience. In the ensuing years, never staying anywhere for long, father and daughter move from one dusty town to the next, her passion for music growing every time she takes the mike in another roadhouse. But it is not an easy life for...

In 1963, at the age of 17, Dwayne Hallston discovers James Brown and wants to perform just like him. His band, the Amazing Rumblers, studies and rehearses Brown's Live at the Apollo album in the storage room of his father's shop in their small North Carolina town. Meanwhile, Dwayne's forbidden black friend Larry — aspiring to play piano like Thelonius Monk — apprentices to a jazz musician called the Bleeder. His mother hopes music will...

An NPR Best Book of 2014
A Time Top Ten Fiction Book of 2014
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A BBC Top Ten Book of 2014
"Exquisite...As inspiring in its way as Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids." —Los Angeles Times

"Briskly addictive . . . Told in the voice of a female rock Ulysses." —O, the Oprah Magazine

"Marvelous . . . D'Erasmo conjures...

"He sang the anthems of a generation: "The Weight," "Up on Cripple Creek," and "Life Is a Carnival." Levon Helm's story--told here through sweeping research and interviews with close friends and fellow musicians--is the rollicking story of American popular music itself. In the Arkansas Delta, a young Levon witnessed "blues, country, and gospel hit in a head-on collision," as he put it. The result was rock 'n' roll. As a teenager, he joined the raucous...

With striking intimacy and candor, Eric Clapton tells the story of his eventful and inspiring life in this poignant and honest autobiography.
More than a rock star, Eric Clapton is an icon, a living embodiment of the history of rock music. Well known for his reserve in a profession marked by self-promotion, flamboyance, and spin, he now chronicles, for the first time, his remarkable personal and professional journeys.
Born illegitimate...

The stories of rock musicians who die young are the thing of lore and legend. Accidents, drug overdoses, plane crashes-all have taken the lives of male rock stars still in their primes. But what became of their widowed brides? How did they survive a loss so great? What is it like to have to share your grief with millions of strangers? And where are these widows today?

Gucci Mane began writing his memoir in a maximum-security federal prison. Released in 2016, he emerged radically transformed. He was sober, smiling, focused, and positive -- a far cry from the Gucci Mane of years past. Born in rural Bessemer, Alabama, Radric Delantic Davis became Gucci Mane in East Atlanta, where the rap scene is as vibrant as the dope game. His name was made as a drug dealer first, rapper second. His mixtapes and street anthems helped...