What does the "country" in country music mean? Most interpret country as a regional or folk music that belongs to people in the hills and in honky-tonks, but Cecelia Tichi argues that it is in fact a national music form, one that belongs to all Americans. In High Lonesome, she shows that country music is strongly linked to our nation's literature and art.

Country music, Tichi argues, explores the same themes that have intrigued this country's premier writers and artists over three centuries: the American road, the meaning of home, class struggle, spiritual travail, and the persistent loneliness of the American character.

These are obsessions that country music artists like Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, Rodney Crowell, Merle Haggard, and Emmylou Harris share with artists not thought of as "pop" - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Thomas Cole, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O'Keeffe.

Generously illustrated with photographs of country music artists and images from American art, High Lonesome uses interviews and biographical profiles to present an insider's look at the schooling, customs, demands, and discipline of country music - an art form that Tichi maintains is emphatically part of mainstream American culture. A compact disc of well-known country songs by leading artists is packaged with the book.