In the day, country music characters like Grandpa Jones, Mel Tillis, and George Jones left a wake of hilarious, poignant, and bawdy tales that Music Row insiders passed around like baseball cards. Of these, none were more often repeated than those involving self-proclaimed “King of Bluegrass” Jimmy Martin, a notorious loose canon. In 1998 music writer Tom Piazza followed Martin on a harrowing visit to the Grand Ole Opry, during which the inebriated singer came close to fisticuffs with at least two members of that venerable institution. Ten years after appearing in The Oxford American, the resulting article, “True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass,” is now available in paperback.

There are places in the Appalachians where entire mountaintops are blown to smithereens; bulldozers push trees, topsoil, dirt, and rocks off the mountainsides; and the debris fills rivers and streams in the valleys below. This practice, known as mountaintop removal mining and valley fill, turns lush green mountains into barren gray moonscapes. Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal, a new collection of oral histories by Silas House and Jason Howard, gives a tally of just what we’re losing to this destructive mining method and notes that the relatively small seams of coal unearthed by the process come at an immeasurably high price.