"In 1990 Lee Smith won the Lyndhurst Prize to study country music, and her research resulted in The Devil's Dream (1992), yet another multi-generational family saga. The story of the musical Bailey family (loosely based, Smith says, on the legendary Carter family), it plumbs nearly a century's worth of history to tell the story of the family's most successful descendant, Katie Cocker, whose career flourishes once she hits Nashville. But The Devil's Dream is really concerned with the problem of success, which, for Katie--as well as for other country musicians and perhaps for all of us--carries within it the genesis of failure. 'What you want, of course, is to be successful,' Smith says. 'You're always singing of home, but you're never home. And there's something about that--I think I feel like that about a lot of things, this intense ambivalence,'" For more on the author, see my write-ups of some of her other books.
New York: Berkeley Books, a 2011 paperback reprint of a 1992 release. 267 pages with Notes that include a kind of discography. Trade paperback.