The Mix: Desperate Music From American Icons–LISTEN to the mix

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/20/139715522/the-mix-desperate-music-from-american-icons

Journalist and author Tom Piazza’s collection of essays, Devil Sent the Rain, features pieces about several musicians whose songs and personas conjure, as he puts it, “the bottom of the American ladder.” There’s the proto-country of Jimmie Rodgers, the early blues of Ma Rainey, the volatile bluegrass of Jimmy Martin, the forgotten honky-tonk of Carl Perkins — all products of a “desperate America.”