Book Review

Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942. By Tony Russell, with editorial research by Bob Pinson. Assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-19-513989-5 (cloth). Pp. xi, 1183. $95.

Biased as I might be, this is clearly the most important and best-executed American music reference book to be published in 2004. I am biased because I first began sending information to Tony Russell in the middle 1980s and am generously credited by Tony as one of the “collectors and researchers who have contributed to this book . . .” (viii). I’m also biased because I have for many years wanted to see this information, much of which has been available in small journals (such as Russell’s own belated Old Time Music), in books on individuals like Charlie Poole and Bob Wills, in small record-collector magazines, and in other sources known to collectors, in one place. Under Russell’s steady hand and after many years, we (78 RPM record collectors, country music historians, musicologists, librarians, et al.) finally have a volume that will proudly sit next to the companion discographies complied by Brian Rust (prewar jazz) and Godrich, Dixon, and Rye (prewar blues and gospel).