Cocaine & Rhinestones is a podcast about the history of country music made in the 20th century…

But I’m not gonna pretend like I have southern accent or talk to you about pickup trucks and chewing tobacco. This is about the truth. You don’t have to know what it’s like to drive a tractor. You don’t need to have spent the last 20 years listening to nothing but Merle Haggard 8 tracks while sipping Pearl beer from a can in order to appreciate these incredible stories and this genius music. You don’t need to “be” country to perform country, so you certainly don’t have to be country to enjoy it. The truth is that country music is wild and it is amazing because the people who made it were wild and they were amazing. Sometimes they went too far. Sometimes, the amazement we feel will not be the happy kind. You can say the same thing about any other genre of music. I’m here to say it (mostly) about country music and country musicians. The reason for that is simple: I don’t see anyone else saying it and I’m pretentious enough to start talking.

I didn’t want to make this podcast. The realization that I was going to have to do it was not comfortable. To say the least, it’s a daunting task and I’ve never done anything like it before. But I couldn’t sleep at night. If I didn’t make Cocaine & Rhinestones, it was never going to exist and I couldn’t bear the thought of that. Stressing out over it may seem ridiculous, I’m aware. It’s a podcast, who cares? But history matters. It’s composed of stories and podcasts are the way we tell stories to each other now. Imagine if an entire genre of music was allowed to go out of print when we made the transition from vinyl to CD. That’s what I saw happening with the lore of country music. Most of what I’m talking about on Cocaine & Rhinestones has been written down in books but nobody’s reading those books. Many of them have never even been converted to digital format. This history wasn’t being passed on to a new generation. It was going extinct.

So, short version: it had to happen, nobody else was going to do it and I knew I had to at least try. Now that I’ve seen the reception to the first season of the podcast, I’m prepared to keep trying (and trying to improve) for as long as it takes to complete the work. If that means I spend the rest of my life making this podcast, that’s what it means. If you’d like to help me do that, you can support the podcast through Patreon, which has the added bonus of monthly behind-the-scenes updates regarding the creation of the show. Anyone who’d like to make a one-time “donation” rather than signing up for monthly support may do so through Patreon, canceling their “subscription” after being charged, or by purchasing books from this Amazon wishlist. These are all books that I will need to read for the podcast at some point. Simply add your selections to the shopping cart and check out as you normally would to have Amazon send the books and they’ll be removed from the list so no repeats are sent.

Thank You,

-TMC