A Night with 2019 Piedmont Laureate, David Menconi
Since 2009, Piedmont Laureates have served as advocates for reading, writing and the arts across the Triangle region. Longtime News & Observer music critic/arts reporter David Menconi is Piedmont Laureate for 2019, with the focus area of creative nonfiction. He'll be talking about Laureate-sponsored plans and events for 2019, which the state has declared its year of music under the heading "Come Hear North Carolina." David will also offer up a preview of his next book, a musical history tentatively titled “The Big Book of North Carolina Music,” to be published in 2020 by UNC Press.
Before he achieved his dream of being an internationally known rock personality, Ryan Adams had a band in Raleigh, North Carolina. Whiskeytown led the wave of insurgent-country bands that came of age with No Depression magazine in the mid-1990s, and for many people it defined the era.
(PLEASE NOTE: This book cannot be returned!)
A six-foot-seven-inch Jewish hippie from Philadelphia starts a Western swing band in 1970, when country fans hate hippies and Western swing. It sounds like a joke but--more than forty years, twenty-five albums, and nine Grammy Awards later--Asleep at the Wheel is still drawing crowds around the world.