Horstman's America's Best Loved Country Songs elaborates and extends the scope of her seminal study of country music, Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy (Horstman, 1975). In both books, Horstman attempts to rescue country music from critical neglect by offering a unique synthesis of scholarly rigour and rich personal experience and insight sponsored by the author's career as a successful country music songwriter, journalist, and radio personality. Hotrstman's professional credentials illuminate the differences between these works. The earlier book, for example, organizes hundreds of classic country song lyrics into thematic chapters examining historical and social aspects of each song's composition and influence. It also includes anecdotes from songwriters, performers, and producers, most of which reappear as author's notes in the volume under review. America's Best Loved Country Songs, on the other hand, abandons the thematic structure of the former work to emphasize the commercial details that perhaps justify Horstman's determination of what songs qualify as “best loved”.
In addition to treating thousands more titles than covered in Sing Your Heart Out, Horstman's America's Best Loved Country Songs exhaustively chronicles the recording, performance, copyright, and chart position of each song included, as well as the use of tunes in movies or as the source of parodies. Indeed, the breadth and aim of her research clearly conveys Horstman's long‐time desire to grant country music the critical attention applied to American jazz and blues (Sing Your Heart Out, p. xi). Even more significant, however, is Horstman's demonstration of her argument that we learn most about a song's cultural impact and reach when we study its life as an object subject to interpretations that can be recorded, rerecorded, transmitted, sold, and purchased. The entries in America's Best Loved Country Songs ably convey this notion and provide a sturdy foundation upon which future country music enthusiasts, whether of a scholarly or other bent, can build. In addition, Horstman has attempted to standardize her citations to correspond to documentation conventions utilized by other music scholars, notably Nat Shapiro and Sigmund Spaeth, both authors of influential histories of popular music. As a result, her data are easily synthesized and made sensible with that of other commentators and scholars.
Organized alphabetically by title, entries in America's Best Loved Country Songs are numbered and include information on responsibility (music/lyrics), copyright (date and renewals), publisher, licensing agency, recording history (including the number of artists who have covered a given title), popular versions, chart positions and awards. See also notes, alternate titles, and information on use in films, parodies, and anecdotes appear when appropriate. An index of songwriters and performers with references to entries allows readers to navigate the volume with ease. Fritzi Horstman, the author's daughter, states that America's Best Loved Country Songs represents her mother's “last word on the subject of country music” (Preface p. 1). While Dorothy Horstman did pass away before this book was ready for publication, her definitive work still conveys her conviction that country music deserves a fresh look and new ways of thinking about and exploring it. Her book not only fills a scholarly gap in popular music history, it also suggests inroads into the critical consideration of the American song‐writing and recording industries in the twentieth century.
