Paul Kingsbury
Paul Kingsbury is an writer/editor and former Deputy Director of the Country Music Hall of Fame. He is now providing communications expertise for the Nature Conservancy, Sustainable Agriculture division. Paul was born in New Haven, Connecticut but his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee when he was around the age of five. In his high school years, Paul would write articles about music and sports for the student paper. He decided to continue his education by enrolling at Vanderbilt University and majoring in English so that he could pursue a career as a writer. Even though Nashville is known as "Music City," at Vanderbilt, Paul didn't really follow country music at all. That was soon about to change when he applied for an editing/writing position at the Country Music Hall of Fame and landed the job. Realizing that he had to get up to speed quickly on the country music industry, Paul buckled down and learned the ropes.
During his tenure at the CMHOF, Paul worked on major restoration and digitizing projects. He had also written and edited many comprehensive publications such as: The Journal of Country Music, Country: The Music and the Musicians, Hatch Show Print - The History of a Great American Poster Shop, The Encyclopedia of Country Music, and many others. He was also instrumental in moving the CMHOF into a new, larger building and assisted in designing and implementing the layout of the new space. Paul has also written numerous books on his own: Grand Ole Opry - History of Country Music, Patsy Cline - Crazy For Loving You, Woodstock - Three Days That Rocked the World, and more. In the past few years Paul has consulted on the new PBS documentary on Country Music by Ken Burns. It will debut later in 2019. I recently talked with Paul about his career.
R.V.B. - Hello Paul. This is Robert von Bernewitz from Long Island, New York... how are you?
P.K. - I'm doing well. How are You?
R.V.B - I'm doing pretty good. It's a little cold here still. How about down by you?
P.K. - We've had a lot of rain here in Tennessee. There's no flooding right now, so we're good.
R.V.B. - I believe I saw that you had about 8" of rain recently.
P.K. - It hasn't been as bad this winter as it was in spring of 2010. We had major flooding across all of Tennessee. We had about 13" of rain in Nashville in less than 48 hours. There is some localized flooding here and there but nothing bad.
R.V.B. - That's good. I think I remember the Gibson factory being damaged in the big flood.
P.K. - Yeah... one of the facilities was damaged. There was also a terrible thing that happened where there was a storage warehouse, where musicians who weren't on the road would store their equipment: their guitars, amps and sound systems. It was called Soundcheck. That place got flooded. Even some very well known musicians, like Vince Gill, Brad Paisley and Keith Urban, had guitars that were damaged or completely destroyed in that flood. It was pretty bad.
R.V.B. - It kept the luthiers busy because I read that they were able to save some of them.
P.K. - Yes, some of them did get saved. We have a Musicians Hall of Fame Museum here in Nashville. It's a worldwide musicians hall of fame. They also had some damaged instruments in the flood. It has since moved to a new facility on higher ground, so hopefully that will never happen again.
R.V.B. - Thank you very much for taking this time for me. Where are you originally from?
P.K. - I was born in New Haven, Connecticut. When I was five, my parents moved to Memphis, Tennessee... so I grew up in Memphis. I went from Memphis to Nashville to go to college at Vanderbilt University. I've had stints where I lived in New York City and New Orleans for a while.
R.V.B. - The wonderful world of music... how did you get exposed to it. How did you become so involved with it?
P.K. - My father is a scientist - a virologist - and is huge fan of music. He recently retired. He plays piano well, having taken lessons for years as a kid. He loves jazz and classical music... but he also liked folk and pop. He had early Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez albums. In the ’60s, when the Beatles hit, he started buying Beatles albums. He wanted to see what all the fuss was about. So the Beatles were popular in our household. I have four brothers and two sisters and we loved listening to them as did my mom and dad. He also bought other rock albums by artists like the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Harry Nilsson before he plunged back to jazz and classical. Even though my mother didn't play an instrument, she sang around the house all the time and loved music, too.
When you moved to Memphis, were you aware it was a big blues town?
P.K. - It's funny... hahaha... my parents were from the New York City area and they didn't really know southern music culture at all. Growing up, we never talked about the blues roots of Memphis or its rockabilly scene. We didn't talk about Sun Records... Stax Records... the R&B stations like WDIA... the blues stations... we didn't talk about anything that was musically happening in Memphis. I grew up in the '60s and '70s and we didn't have the internet. We had three TV networks and a public station. My brothers and sisters and I were musically kind of clueless. I personally didn't start to learn about the musical heritage in Memphis until I went to college... hahaha. I remember friends explaining to me about Sun Records...Elvis... Jerry Lee Lewis... Carl Perkins... and I was stunned to learn all of that came from Memphis. It was an awakening. After I left Memphis, I had to return to the city and learn the heritage that had been right beside me.
R.V.B. - I see that you received a B.A. in English at Vanderbilt. Were you on the track of a music career at that time?
P.K. - I got an English degree because I wanted to pursue writing. I had no idea that I would have a chance to write about music. In Memphis, I was writing for my high school newspaper as kind of a rock critic. I would write about music that I liked, that I thought was hip. I also wrote a little in college publications. Although I was passionate about music, I didn't know how I could connect that with a real writing career about music. With the degree, I was just aiming myself towards some kind of writing and editing. On the side, for fun, I was also learning how to play guitar... not with any ambitions that I would be professional. I just loved music so I wanted to learn how to play.
R.V.B. - What kind of guitar did you get?
P.K. - The first guitar that I learned on was a classical guitar that my dad bought my mother. With seven kids, she never really had time to practice. She let me borrow her guitar to bring to college. Then I bought a cheap - no name - electric. Somebody scratched the name off of it. The first decent quality acoustic guitar I bought was a Yamaha. That was about a year out of college. At the time I think I spent $250 on it. I've since expanded my guitar collection. I now have a Fender Stratocaster, a blond Guild F-50, a 1970s Takamine F-340 (the model that was a knockoff of the Martin D-28) and a Composite Acoustics travel guitar.
R.V.B. - In your college years at Vanderbilt - with Nashville being a country town - did you catch any acts?
P.K. - I saw a lot of acts in college and just after: Gordon Lightfoot, the Police, Ray Charles, George Thoroughgood, Greg Allman, Michael Hedges, Amy Grant, Jason & the Scorchers, Tom Petty, REM, the Talking Heads, Joe Jackson, the Stray Cats, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. But not country. To be honest at that time when I was at Vanderbilt, I wasn't really into the country scene. I had only the vaguest notion of what the Grand Ole Opry was and what Music Row was. I didn't listen to much country music in college. I wasn't pulled towards it. So I was going to rock concerts... folk concerts... blues concerts... Christian music concerts, but not country. It was right after I graduated from college that I discovered Music Row is right there... three or four streets away from Vanderbilt. And you can actually go to the Grand Ole Opry to see a cool radio show that's been going on since 1925. What can I say? I was a slow learner. It took me a while. The first country album I ever bought was Hank Williams Greatest Hits. I thought, "These songs and performances are great. I had read people saying, "These songs from Hank Williams are a touchstone for American music." So when I started learning about country music, I went right to the wellspring. Hank Williams. The Hillbilly Shakespeare.
R.V.B. - It was a good choice. He's an imposing 6' 3" figure and a country music icon.
P.K. - I have a lot of Hank Williams music now... in part, thanks to some of the work we did at the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum. Early on when I was working at the Hall of Fame, we issued two LPs of his previously unreleased demo recordings. They blew me away. Just the raw emotion, honesty and poetry of them. Then several years later I helped put out a box set of Hank Williams that includes all of his studio recordings as well as radio transcriptions and even more demos etc. It won two Grammy Awards by the way. When I first stumbled on Hank Williams Greatest Hits, I had no clue that this was the start of anything. But it was.
R.V.B. - That's a good place to start. How did you get the Country Hall of Fame Museum gig?
P.K. - I had been doing a few writing gigs around Nashville--writing and editing for a sports publisher and then at Vanderbilt University in the school magazine department. There was a job opening for a writer and editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1984. Two of my good friends that I knew through Vanderbilt, both of them knew a man named Kyle Young... who at the time was the Deputy Director for Special Projects at the Country Music Hall of Fame. Kyle said, "I'm looking for a writer and editor. They don't have to know a lot about country music but they have to like music... They need to be curious and be a good writer. Our staff will teach you everything you need to know about the music." My friends, whom Kyle had asked to recommend a writer, both told Kyle, "You ought to talk to this guy Paul Kingsbury. He’s not a country music expert, but he likes music a lot and he’s a good writer and editor." So I applied for the job and interviewed with Kyle, and other members of the staff, and lo and behold, I was hired. I jumped in. Kyle was a great mentor. He pointed me to the books and music I needed to absorb. He said, "Okay, now you've got to dive in and learn this stuff." The first book he handed me was Bill C. Malone's Country Music U.S.A. The first great history book of country music. Kyle said, "You need to read it and become fully conversant with this stuff." I dove right in immediately and read that. He recommended other books too as did other staff members at the Hall of Fame. The beauty of the Country Music Hall of Fame staff is you have so many passionate, deeply knowledgeable fans of country music and also other styles of music. The hallway conversations were so great. People would say, "Hey... have you heard this new music by Steve Earle or Lyle Lovett or Iris DeMent? Have you ever heard this old Bob Wills cut Brain Cloudy Blues or Johnny Paycheck’s Pardon Me, I’ve Got Someone to Kill? Let's pull out a record player... you need to hear this." At the same time, I was working with these fellow staff members putting together historic reissues of important music like the Bristol Sessions and the key recordings of Kitty Wells, Bill Monroe, Webb Pierce as well as music that had never been publicly for sale before like the Hank Williams demos I mentioned. Our audio engineer Alan Stoker would constantly be working on re-mastering projects, and every day—several times a day—I’d walk by his studio office and hear all of this great country music that he was doing restoration re-mastering on.
R.V.B. - It sounded like you were a kid in a candy store.
P.K. - Yeah! For me, I needed to be open to listening to these experts on our staff and be open to the sounds they were trying to turn me on to. Music and great insights about music were all around me. I just dove in head first and had a blast. I worked on many great projects for years and years.
R.V.B. - What was the first main project that you were assigned to?
P.K. - One thing that really brought up my knowledge fairly quickly was... I was told when I was hired that one of my jobs would be to edit a magazine that the Country Music Hall of Fame did "The Journal of Country Music." It had started out originally an attempt at an academic journal. It had been started by the Country Music Hall of Fame's first director, Bill Ivey. When Bill hired Kyle, they felt there wasn't much demand for the journal and they weren't finding good scholarly articles for an academic journal of this kind, so they morphed it into a serious magazine about country music and it became less academic. That’s the point where I came in and became the editor of The Journal of Country Music. So I was assigning and commissioning articles for it - I was reaching out to journalists... sometimes they were academics like Bill Malone and Charles Wolfe...but mostly music journalists and music authors. The writers who worked with me and who we published were the cream of the crop: Peter Guralnick, Nick Tosches, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, Alanna Nash, Colin Escott, Holly George-Warren, Chet Flippo, Ken Tucker. I too did writing for the Journal of Country Music myself. In the process of working with all of these great writers and researchers, and having to do my own interviews, it was just a great education. The first big book project that I did was our big pictorial of country music that came out in 1988 called "Country: the Music and the Musicians."Nobody had ever put out such a lavish and carefully researched pictorial history, covering the entire commercial history of country music. It was from the 1920's and it took us through 1988. We commissioned top scholars and writers to write about country music in that book. So it was a multi-author book... edited by me. It was a blast working on it. It was really hard work to put it all together—I remember that among other things I wrote extensive captions for more than 500 photos!--but it turned out well. It got amazing reviews and won a Ralph J. Gleason Award from Rolling Stone magazine. It sold well, too. We went to a 2nd hard cover edition in 1994. I have a photo on my living room wall of Bruce Springsteen in his living room with that book on the coffee table. You gotta love that. That was the first really big project besides The Journal of Country Music.
R.V.B. - I understand that you were also involved with the displays in the museum?
P.K. - I became more involved in the late '90s when we were moving to a new Country Music Hall of Fame Museum building. The original building was on Music Row. We had outgrown it. We had too much that we wanted to do and had too many archival items for the space we had. So we made plans to move into a brand-new building. When we were making that move in the late '90s into the early '2000s, I had risen from being editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame to being Deputy Director of Special Projects. Kyle Young, who had that job before me moved up to the CEO slot... the Director of the Country Music Hall of Fame. I had a staff of nine and we were working with another Deputy Director at the time on planning out all of the exhibits. I was very intimately involved in helping to select the right artifacts to displaying the right costumes, song manuscripts, instruments, etc.
R.V.B. - Elvis Presley's Cadillac!
P.K. - Yeah... things like that. Also writing the text panels for the exhibits so that people know what they're looking at. I was also the supervising producer for some of the new films at the CMHOF. I was helping to pull together audio stations as well. It was a busy time for those two or three years, but very rewarding. Have you ever been to the Country Music Hall of Fame?
R.V.B. - Yes I have. I was there Approximately six or seven years ago. A lot of things stuck out in my mind. The main thing was Maybelle Carter's guitar. Another thing that stuck with me was when I walked up the stairs, I saw the Wanda Jackson movie. It was near the beginning of the tour.
P.K. - That's right. You're remembering it right. Everything is arranged in chronological order. When you get off the elevator and pass the early string bands, early duets and cowboy singers, you see Wanda Jackson up on a big screen shimmying in her dress. It's a film we created with a lot of footage of rockabilly singers of the 1950's. So you've got Wanda Jackson there juxtaposed with Jerry Lee Lewis... Elvis... Buddy Holly... Roy Orbison... Johnny Cash... it's a great little looped video. It's still running today.
R.V.B. - And of course the Cadillac. It's was very nicely laid out. You have the big grand hall when you first walk in... I guess where the restaurant is?
P.K. - Yes... when you first walk into the ground floor of the Country Music Hall of Fame, there is a big glassed in lobby, with beautiful wood flooring and great stone work on the walls. It's a great multi-purpose lobby. It has a restaurant that serves food and it leads to the ticket counter. You take the elevator to the second floor and that's where you start your journey. When you've completed the second floor, you take some stairs down past the Wall of Gold Records. See, when you get to the end of a hallway, you see this enormous wall covered with gold and platinum records. One of my jobs in developing the new Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum was putting together that wall filled with all the gold and platinum records that country artists had earned from the beginning when the RIAA started to award gold and platinum records up to the time we opened the museum in the early 2000's.
R.V.B. - I remember that for sure. I took a picture there.
P.K. –Then when you go through a doorway to the spiral staircase to the next exhibit floor you realize wall on the back side is full of them also... hahaha. That was a really fun thing to do. I remember when we were brainstorming that idea. We realized it would be easy for us to work with the RIAA to get duplicate versions of all these gold and platinum records for the wall. I think it's kind of visually stunning, and it's really cool to see them in chronological order.
R.V.B. - It's a lot of gold and platinum.
P.K. - Yeah... it's a lot of gold and platinum.
R.V.B. - I remember when I went to Nashville, I didn't realize that it was spring break and there were a ton of kids there. I went to the Hall of Fame to get away... hahaha.
P.K. - Hahaha... that's good.
R.V.B. - This leads me to Hatch Show Print. You wrote a book on the history of them?
P.K. - Yeah... the Country Music Hall of Fame acquired Hatch Show Print in the late 1980's. Hatch Show Print was founded in the late 1800's and did these marvelous show posters for all matters... shows of traveling entertainers... the circus... minstrel shows... and as the country music industry got going, and needed show posters, Hatch Show Print started printing posters for them... Minnie Pearl... Gene Autry... Eddy Arnold... Elvis Presley... Johnny Cash and others. The interesting thing about Hatch Show Print is that not only is it an old shop with an interesting history of printing entertainment posters but it kept the old printing plates and wood blocks and continues to use the old style process that was used to make the original Gutenberg Bible. You’re taking wood blocks and metal blocks and you're inking them, and rolling a piece of paper over the inked surfaces. Every time you want to put a new color on, you have to clean off all the previous ink... arrange the new blocks and add the new color. You repeat the process until all the desired colors and images are complete. It's a beautiful process. The Country Music Hall of Fame acquired Hatch Show Print because it was kind of being orphaned. It was outdated technology and a lot of modern companies didn't want anything to do with it. So for historical purposes, the Country Music Hall of Fame acquired it. I was in charge of both Hatch Show Print and the division where we published books about country music and related culture. We also developed our own in-house books. We would not only publish outside authors who came to us and had good book ideas, we also created our own books like the pictorial history that I described earlier. So we realized once we had a good handle on Hatch Show Print... we were running it well... we knew what the inventory was... it was time to write a history of this amazing poster shop. I got together with Jim Sheradden, who had been a long time manager of the shop, and Elek Horvath, who at the time was Jim Sheradden's right hand man. Those guys really knew what was in the shop. They knew a lot of the history that had been passed down. They found a lot of historical documentation and sales records. We pooled our knowledge together and wrote the book. Fortunately, we found a really great publisher - Chronicle Books - in San Francisco, which understood our vision that really showed off these beautiful historic posters through the years. The book is still in print. It goes through edition after edition. There are a lot of people who like that old style of printing and the music history that's tied up with it. Myself included!
R.V.B. - Because of the process, it kind of makes each individual poster, one of a kind.
P.K. - Yes. Each one is just a little bit different. You're exactly right. It's as far from digital as you can get.
R.V.B. - It's similar to the Andy Warhol prints. Was the building on the strip on Broadway the original location?
P.K. - No. It had actually been in a couple of other locations before that. When the Hall of Fame acquired Hatch Show Print, we moved it into a nice old storefront Broadway, which is one of the main thoroughfares in downtown Nashville. I haven't been on the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame since the early 2000's, but a couple of years ago they realized it would probably be better in managing Hatch Show Print if they just moved everything out of that Broadway storefront into a brand new space in the Country Music Hall of Fame. It looks great. I've really enjoyed the times that I've gone back to the new Hatch Show Print. They've done a nice job even though it's a new space. A lot of the old memorabilia that they had on display at the old building, and they've managed to arrange it all very nicely in the new space. It's a great blend of old and new, so Hatch Show Print goes on.
R.V.B. - From what I remember on the strip, there wasn't a lot of wall space to display the posters at the old space.
P.K. - I think another big consideration of moving it into the Hall of Fame building was that they couldn't really manage climate control. You're talking about woodblocks that could crack and warp if the air gets too damp or dry. They thought that for the integrity of the collection... and for the safety of everyone... we can control things if we can move it into the Hall of Fame's own building. I should add that Hatch Show Print is still as accessible to the public as it ever was. You can walk into Hatch Show Print through a street entrance without paying admission to the museum. If Hatch Show Print is what you're interested in, there's a very clear public entrance to go in.
R.V.B. - Outstanding... great. People like to go in and buy the posters. I bought a couple myself. Now onto something completely different... you wrote a book about Woodstock?
P.K. - Yeah. One of the publishers I had worked with on a book with the Country Music Hall of Fame... we had done yet another pictorial music history, in the mid 2000's. We did the book called "Will the Circle be Unbroken: Country Music in America." This book gave us the opportunity to again, tell the story in pictorial form with a lot of different authors contributing. But we did this pictorial history in a different way from the previous one. Anyway, the publisher of that book approached me a few years later and said, " You know, I've got an author - a British guy Mike Evans - who would really like to do a book on Woodstock. As good as a rock writer as he is, he needs an American collaborator. Mike's going to make trips over to the US - to the Woodstock area - and talk to artists in person, but we also need somebody to be there who's an American music expert and who understands what Woodstock meant to America.” We published it in 2009 for the fortieth anniversary. In 2008, we got together in the Woodstock area to begin research... We drove around and started interviewing people who were still in the community. We formed our plan of action and got going on it, tracking down the original artists and concert crew. The book is another pictorial history, even though it's got a lot of text. It's got some spectacular photos in it.
R.V.B. - I've been to the Woodstock site many times. I prefer the Bethel Woods concert venue better that the local Jones Beach theater here. It's got better sound quality.
P.K. - When I went to where the Woodstock museum is, in 2008, for the first time I saw that huge natural amphitheater where they held the concert. When you see that landscape, you can imagine it all. I was too young to attend the original Woodstock, but I've watched the movie several times and have seen thousands of photos, but to actually see that natural amphitheater on Max Yasgur's farm... Wow! Of course! I can imagine all of those people covering those fields.
R.V.B. - It's really an amazing feeling when you step on that site. When you look up at the hill, you can almost feel the excitement. It's in the air. It's kind of like being in the Ryman Auditorium.
P.K. - Yeah! It is that kind of feeling. It's hallowed grounds and it's great that the museum is there, preserving the history of that particular festival, and the artists who had performed there. I think the museum is doing a good job.
R.V.B. - It's the big Anniversary this year.
P.K. - Our book is coming back out in the summer. No doubt there will be a lot of other good books about the festival as well.
R.V.B. - You changed occupations and started working for the Nature Conservancy.
P.K. - I worked for the Country Music Hall of Fame for about 16 years. I thought, "I've been working for a long time at something that's been great." Over time I got more and more responsibility and more financial pressures. Eventually I thought, "Okay... I’ve enjoyed as much of this as I can stand—to quote an old Bill Anderson song," so I moved to freelance writing for a while. After five years of freelance writing, I thought it was time for another salaried job. I went to The Nature Conservancy to do communications for them. I had been donating to them. They're a nonprofit organization. Their mission is to protect the land and waters on which all life depends on. It's an environmental conservation organization and they do great work. I joined them in 2006 and I enjoy doing communications for them. I still do freelance writing on the side.
R.V.B. - Do you get to go out in the field and visit sites and trails?
P.K. - Yes... I've done a lot of that. The Nature Conservancy will sometimes purchase land from willing sellers and create nature preserves. The Nature Conservancy also often buys land and works to create public parks. During the years that I have been director of communications for them in Tennessee, I've been on many forest trails... many caves... paddled many rivers... walked through many streams. I’ve been extremely fortunate. First, I had a wonderful gig working for the Country Music Hall of Fame... getting paid a salary to hear music all the time, interview country artists and write about them...And in this later phase of my career I have a wonderful gig working for The Nature Conservancy, getting paid to walk in the woods or paddle on a river, and write about it.
R.V.B. - You set yourself up. You worked hard and got some breaks and now have a nice career going. What accomplishments are you proud about during your tenure at the Country Music Hall of Fame?
P.K. - One thing that leaps out at me is that researchers are really benefiting from one particular thing I did when I was Deputy Director there. For many years, the Country Music Hall of Fame had an oral history program that was started by a very knowledgeable historian named John Rumble. He would go out with a tape recorder and record interviews with key historical performers... business people... managers... show promoters... record producers... session musicians and developed a great resource. Here we had all these great tapes, with important country music people, going on the record about their careers and what they had witnessed. I said to John, "It's great to have all these tapes. You know what's on them, but nobody else does. We need to go find a grant and get these things transcribed and digitized so researchers can really use them." At that point, all people could do is go to the Country Music Hall of Fame’s library, sit down and listen to a tape. John could tell them, "In general, the interviewee is going to talk about this... this and this," but you're kind of flying blind as a researcher. So we got the grant that we needed.
Now the Country Music Hall of Fame oral history collection, which has hundreds of interviews in it, is transcribed and digitized. Now the original tapes are preserved and researchers can read the transcriptions. That's the grunt work of museum archives. In terms of the publications projects, I'm very proud of the pictorial books we published as well as the Country Music Encyclopedia that I directed and edited. We set a goal that we were going to make it the most comprehensive... the most authoritative... the most accurate, country music encyclopedia that you could do. I hired 150+ experts. Some were journalists and some were academics... to write these encyclopedia entries. 1,300 of them. I worked with our staff to develop a comprehensive list of not only country music performers... promoters... business people but country music themes and topics. I put together instructions for these 1,300 articles. It took us about four or five years, but we came out with the most comprehensive and accurate encyclopedia of country music that has ever been published. It’s regularly cited by publications like the New York Times. It came out in 1998, and we revised and updated it in 2012. I'm immensely proud of that. I think it turned out really well. A third thing that I'm proud of is... I'm a huge fan of Patsy Cline... during my tenure as well as after the Country Music Hall of Fame, I had the opportunity to work on various album reissue projects of Patsy Clines music. While I was working at the Hall of Fame I directed the release of the first big Patsy Cline box set. It was put together in 1991. It was called "The Patsy Cline Collection." It was a four CD set. I wrote a detailed booklet based on interviews with many people who knew Patsy Cline well. I'm looking in my office right now at the platinum record award that I received from MCA Records for that boxed set.
R.V.B. - I also see that you had a Grammy nomination.
P.K. - When I was at the Hall of Fame we put together a groundbreaking three CD set on black artists doing country music from the 1920s onward called From Where I Stand. We received a nomination for that.
I continue to write about music as a freelancer and manage music projects in my spare time. In 2013, I was the managing editor and a writer, along with some other writers, for the biographies in the new Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame museum. You can visit that place in downtown Nashville now.
More recently, I contributed several essays that are in a new compact history book on rock called “30-Second Rock Music,” which was published last fall by the Ivy Press. The book was put together by my British friend and Woodstock collaborator Mike Evans. And for the past seven years, I’ve been a consultant to PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and his team—he did the Civil War series on PBS as well as series on jazz and baseball—for their upcoming documentary series on the history of country music. Early on, I critiqued outlines and scripts, and recently I got to review and make suggestions on the rough cuts of the eight episodes. I can tell you the series is going to be amazing. It will air on PBS in September. I’m very proud to be associated with it.
R.V.B. - Your great work definitely benefited the music community. The music community is proud of your work as you are. You're doing a great service for us. I congratulate you on your career and keep up the good work.
P.K. –Thank you, Robert. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
Interview conducted by Robert von Bernewitz
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