This is the story of an American treasure that records and evokes the lives of people who often weren't written up in newspapers, but whose experiences of momentous events - the Depression, the Dustbowl, the Second World War - transformed their lives and would be the catalyst for an original American art form: country music.

In the Country of Country is an exhilarating transcontinental journey from Maces Springs, Virginia, home of The Carter Family, to Bakersfield, California, where Buck Owens held sway. En route we visit the backroads, rural hills, and railway crossings where Doc Watson, Sara Carter, Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, and Jimmie Rodgers (The Father of Country Music) first learned to play their guitars, fiddles, and mandolins.

Nicholas Dawidoff has traveled to the places where country music first emerged and talked to the musicians, writers, and singers who created this deceptively simple-worded, string-driven, melodic music.

Here are indelible portraits of Johnny Cash, behind whose black apparel lies a Faustian dilemma between fame and creativity; Merle Haggard, a man as elusive as he is gifted; Patsy Cline, who would happily curl her girlfriends' hair as she curled their ears with her sailor's mouth; and Harlan Howard, the king of country songwriters.

Inherent in Dawidoff's chronicle is a critique of contemporary country music - the pop/rock hybrid known as Hot Country that often stands in sharp contrast to the spirit of old-time country music. In the Country of Country is a book full of wonderful stories that together reveal an underappreciated piece of American culture.