Seeing Charlie Louvin last night made my day; it might’ve even made my whole year. It wasn’t perfect—for that I’d need to go back 50 years and add his brother, Ira, back into the mix—but it was damn close.

It was wonderful. Louvin was just the cutest thing I’d ever seen: a tiny man in suspenders and a newsboy hat. And he was hilarious and sassy, cracking jokes with great timing and adlibbing alternate lyrics to songs. Before and after the show, he made his way through the audience to set up shop near the entrance, personally selling CDs and 8-by-10 glossies, signing autographs, and chatting.

He played a lot of Louvin Brothers songs, of course, but he also played some of his solo tunes from long ago and a lot of covers, like “Waiting for a Train,” “Working Man Blues,” “Dark as a Dungeon,” and songs by the Monroe Brothers and the Delmore Brothers (some of these songs are on his latest album, Charlie Louvin). Seeing “Knoxville Girl” performed live made the song—about a man beating his lover to death and throwing her into a river—so much more brutal. He played for over two hours, which is a long time, but the audience just wouldn’t let him stop, and, he said, he wanted to make us happy. A woman yelled out a request for the song “Katie Dear”; his band didn’t know it, so he sang an abridged version a cappella.

He’s 79, so his voice has aged. It’s deeper and raspier, but I thought it was still great and, although weaker, still conveyed immense emotion. When he performed “When I Stop Dreaming,” it was so beautiful I nearly melted. I might’ve died on the spot had I seen the Louvin Brothers perform it in their heyday. Listening to the intensity in Louvin’s voice and the way he sings a sad song made me see just how powerful a Louvin Brothers concert would have been back then.

And there was a bizarre, totally random occurrence that night. Louvin introduced a local man standing up front as the grandson of the man involved in the drunk-driving accident that “bumped off” his brother, Ira (his words, not mine) in 1965. Weird.

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Speaking of the Louvin Brothers, I read a great book a while back called In the Country of Country (1997) by Nicholas Dawidoff.

It’s based on research and interviews with absolute legends of classic country music (several of whom are now dead) about their lives before, during, and after their country careers, offering scholarly research and critical analysis of their music and what makes it so damn special (as opposed to the crap coming out of Nashville today).

Most interestingly, Charlie Louvin really fills us in on his brother—he talks about him in a really matter-of-fact way, discussing his great talents and his tortured soul. Ira Louvin wrote some of country’s most beautiful and heartbreaking songs, including lots of gospel, yet was a raging, violent alcoholic who on occasion smashed his mandolin onstage, and once tried to kill his wife. I can’t imagine the awkwardness of seeing a man playing beautiful, calm country music become irate and smash a mandolin onstage. Ira’s drinking and general meanness brought about the breakup of the group, and soon thereafter he was killed.

In addition, there are some great interviews with and insights from Rose Maddox; amazing songwriter Harlan Howard (“Pick Me up on Your Way Down,” “Heartaches by the Number,” “I Fall to Pieces”), who reveals that he got a lot of the inspiration for his songs from eavesdropping at honky tonks; Johnny Cash, who, the book tells us, wrote almost all his songs in a three- to four-year period in the ’50s, suggesting that it was all so emotionally taxing that he stopped writing and started getting wasted instead; Buck Owens; Doc Watson; Kitty Wells (whose 1952 hit “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” was banned by the Grand Ole Opry because it posited that men caused women to seek solace in bars, not the other way around); Bill Monroe; Merle Haggard; George Jones (who, according to the book, has a personal barber do his hair every morning at his house); and more. There are also chapters on the Carter Family’s Sara Carter, and Patsy Cline (who told a state trooper she’d “screw the boots off” him), and the introduction focuses on Jimmie Rodgers—unfortunately, they could not be interviewed from beyond the grave.

And another good book I recently read: Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture by Barbara Ching.

This book examines the country music made by working-class men who live as hard or harder than what’s depicted in the songs they write, men who always lose (jobs, women, sanity, personal battles). Hurrah for bringing some cultural theory to country music!

In a captivating chapter titled A Hard Act to Follow, Ching does an interesting analysis of softcore, generally crappy Hank Williams Jr. contrasted with a profile of his hardcore dad. It really opened my eyes to how hard it was for Hank Jr. to grow up in the shadow of his larger-than-life dad; I even felt sympathetic toward ol’ Jr. He was only 3 when his dad died, but when he got a little older, his mom (the inspiration for so many of Hank Sr.’s heartbreaking songs) started him on a music career replicating his dad—but he was, of course, no Hank Sr. Later he kicked his mom to the curb, attempted suicide, and had his face nearly ripped off when he fell down a mountain (hence the beard and sunglasses).

Also included in Wrong’s What I Do Best: examinations of George Jones, real-life ex-con Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck, and several others. I highly recommend this book.