Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
The only complete and official guide to Billboard Top Country Singles charts

* Complete history of Top 40 country hits since 1942
* More than 200 pictures of top recording artists
* Author Joel Whitburn is the leading authority on charted music

From the days of Red Foley and Hank Williams, through Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash, to the Dixie Chicks and Toby Keith, Billboard magazine has been keeping tabs on the best-sellers in country music. Today country music is hotter than ever before, as its appeal broadens to include young urbanites. Now all the information since the earliest Billboard charts--compiled in 1942--has been gathered into one essential reference: The Billboard Book of Top 40 Country Hits, newly updated and expanded to capture today’s top recording artists and their biggest songs. Complete, authoritative chart information on the most popular songs and artists make this a great book for music fans, record collectors, industry professionals, and trivia lovers. It’s even better than coming home to your baby after driving your truck all night in the rain!

Rating : - Joel Whitburn's Billboard Book of Top 40 Country Hits
In keeping with the overall quality of his series of Billboard Top 40 books, Joel Whitburn has once again provided an excellent compendium of the top charting country hits and artists, dating all the way back from 1944 to 2006. Whether you're a died-in-the-wool country music fan or just a big fan of music, this book is a delight to simply peruse or to use as your bible for country music.

Organized like the other books in this series (e.g., Top 40 Hits, Top 40 R&B Hits), the book lists all the charted songs by each artist, organized alphabetically by artist. For each song, the date, number of weeks, highest chart position, and record label are provided. Likewise, for each artist or group, some brief biographical information is provided. Interspersed throughout the book are pages with pictures of album or singles covers from sample artists and brief narratives about those artists or songs. The back of the book also includes an alphabetical index of all charted songs, as well as listing the artist, year, and highest chart position.

And for people who are interested in rankings of the best songs and artists, additional tables at the back of the book list the Top 100 songs of the era, the top singles by decade, the Top 100 artists of the era, the top artists by decade, the biggest top 40 artist achievements (e.g., most #1 hits), and a chronological list of all #1 songs by year.

I started many years ago with Joel Whitburn's book of popular Top 40 hits and have purchased multiple editions of that book in subsequent years. I found those books so enjoyable as handy references and to help me get deeper into many artists catalogues of hits, that I eventually also purchased the Book of Top 40 R&B Hits and this Book of Top 40 Country Hits as my musical interests expanded and deepened in these genres.

I would think that books like this one would be "must-have's" for disc jockeys and music historians. For died-in-the-wool music fans like myself, books like this one are a pure delight that I keep handy whenever I am listening to music, adding songs to my iPod, creating personal playlists of songs, or simply wanting to expand or refresh my knowledge about particular artists and songs over the years.

I highly recommend this book as being up to the same high standards as the other books in Joel Whitburn's series of Billboard Top 40 hits. It's a great reference book for any serious music fan to keep handy when listening to or thinking about all these delightful (and not-so-delightful) songs and artists that made it into the enviable weekly "top 40" lists on the music charts.