Looking Back to See
A Country Music Memoir

Maxine Brown
foreword by Tom T. Hall

Revealing, entertaining window on the music world of the fifties and the sixties. (more …)

“Looking Back to See is a good book. It touches my heart to hear her story and to think back to my boyhood. Her story is real.”

—Eddy Arnold, legendary country music star

March 2005
400 pages, 58 photographs, discography, hits and awards, glossary, index
6" x 9"
$24.95 cloth
ISBN 1-55728-790-2

Our Own Sweet Sounds
A Celebration of Popular Music in Arkansas

Second edition

Robert Cochran

A rich portrait of the community that is Arkansas, manifested in song, Our Own Sweet Sounds celebrates the diversity of musical forms and music makers that have graced the state since territorial times. (more …)

2005, 124 pages, 75 photographs
$16.95 paper, 1-55728-793-1

Singing in Zion
Music and Song in the Life of One Arkansas Family

Robert Cochran

This book is a lyrical, scholarly exploration of the connection between one family's musical traditions and its rural community of Zion, Arkansas. In 1959, three Gilbert sisters—Alma, Helen, and Phydella—began compiling songs they remembered as their own and sending them to one another in letters. Their tendency to center memory in sound rather than sight reveals an unusual musical birthright.

Robert Cochran has constructed a composite portrait of this family for whom music is the center of life. He examines their lived experience as they anchor their history through song, singing, and the playing of musical instruments. The Gilberts are wonderful exemplars of the "mediation of oral tradition," and when approached through their music, they reveal themselves as remarkable individuals with an elaborate and firmly held sense of their unique identities.

A decade in the making, Singing in Zion is written with a memoirist's sense of family history and an ethnographer's sense of the rich encounter of worlds. This narrative has a seductive simplicity that conveys much of the Gilbert family's charm while at the same time establishing a broader framework that is firmly academic. It will be enjoyed by all readers.

Robert Cochran is the director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies and a professor in the English department at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Winner of several awards and fellowships, his previous publications include Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life (University of Illinois Press, 1985), Samuel Beckett: A Study of the Short Fiction (G.K. Hall Publishers, 1991), Our Own Sweet Sounds (University of Arkansas Press, 1996, 2005), and A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice (Arkansas 2003).

1999, 256 pages, 26 illustrations
$39.95 cloth (s), 978-1-55728-547-8 | 1-55728-547-0
$24.95 paper (s), 978-1-55728-548-5 | 1-55728-548-9

Roll Me in Your Arms
"Unprintable" Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, Volume I, Folksongs and Music

Vance Randolph, Edited with an Introduction by G. Legman

Roll Me in Your Arms, Volume I includes 180 unexpurgated songs collected by Randolph, with tunes transcribed from the original singers.

1992, 582 pages
$60.00 cloth (s), 1-55728-231-5

Blow the Candle Out
"Unprintable" Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, Volume II, Folk Rhymes and Other Lore

Vance Randolph, Edited with an Introduction by G. Legman

"A cause for celebration! One more great Randolph collection sees the light of print. Legman's annotations are superb."

—Robert Cochran, author of Our Own Sweet Sounds

1992, 392 pages
$60.00 cloth (s), 1-55728-237-4