Author Description

"Jimmy Martin was just twenty-two years old when Bill Monroe asked him to join the Blue Grass Boys. That invitation was the start of a fifty-year recording career, recently celebrated with Martin's induction into the International Bluegrass Music Association's Hall of Honor. At age seventy-two, he still regularly performs with his band, the Sunny Mountain Boys. Yet the man himself remains an obscure figure, compared with other bluegrass greats, such as Ralph Stanley or the Osborne Brothers."--BOOK JACKET. "Fiction writer and music critic Tom Piazza couldn't understand why Martin wasn't better known. So, on assignment from The Oxford American magazine, he drove from his home in New Orleans to Nashville to find out. Although aware that Martin had a reputation as a heavy drinker and a volatile personality, Piazza found himself pitched headlong into a world he couldn't have anticipated. Martin's mercurial personality drew the writer into a series of escalating encounters (with mean dogs, broken-down cars, and near electrocution), culminating in a harrowing and unforgettable expedition, with Martin, to the Grand Ole Opry."--BOOK JACKET.