Roadkill On The Three Chord Highway By Colin Escott Routledge 2002 229 Pages ISBN:  0-415-93782-5

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Roadkill on the Three-Chord Highway is a new collection of Colin Escott's wonderful biographies of the legends of rock, rockabilly, and country. Escott is world renowned for telling the stories of not only the major stars, but also the Tex Nobodies that populate the back alleys of American music. For every struggling singer or songwriter who breaks through, there are hundreds more who labor in the shadows, victims of bad luck, bad timing, or themselves. It's the real stories, not the publicists' confections, that concern Colin Escott. We hear Perry Como's story in his own words: It wasn't all smooth. We learn about the astonishing twists and turns in Roy Orbison's life and the stories behind the songs we know so well. And we go down with Vernon Oxford, the last great honky tonk singer, who came to Nashville just a little too late. These are stories for anyone who loves what Escott calls "little songs from great sorrows." They will fascinate even the most casual fan of popular music, and they're told here in sympathetic, engaging, and illuminating prose. About the Author Colin Escott lives outside of Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of Tattooed on Their Tongues: Journeys through the Backrooms of American Music and Hank Williams: The Biography, and coauthor of Hank Williams: Snapshots from the Lost Highway and Good Rockin' Tonight: The Sun Records Story. He has annotated more than five hundred recordings and has won numerous awards for his writing, including a Grammy for historic documentation and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the ARSC (Association for Recorded Sound Collections), a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving the history of recorded sound.