Reading Geoffrey Himes’s latest book, In-Law Country, brought to mind another of my favorite writers, Malcolm Gladwell.  Gladwell, known for The Tipping Point, Outliers, and other provocative takes on contemporary society, devoted an entire episode of his Revisionist History podcast to, of all things, country music.  He posited that country music, more than any other genre, is best at conveying the profound vulnerability, heartache, grief, and regret that often accompany adulthood.  In a kind of musical cage match of misery, Gladwell pitted two songs about the unexpected death of a loved one against each other to prove his point.

One was a rock song, Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones, the other country, Boulder to Birmingham by Emmylou Harris.  Gladwell created a “sadness index” to gauge the relative anguish of each, and by his calculations, Harris’s song was the hands down winner in the race to the bottom of the pit of despair.  But I wasn’t convinced.  By my calculations, Wild Horses was the sadder song.  After reading In-Law Country and talking with Himes, however, I am beginning to come around.

Himes is a Baltimore-based music journalist, author, songwriter, poet, musician, performer, and friend to the local arts scene.  In-Law Country: How Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash and Their Circle Fashioned a New Kind of Country Music 1968-1985, published last year by Country Music Foundation Press is a thoroughly entertaining, deep, deep dive into an influential subgenre of music that no one but Himes even recognized as such until a few years ago.

I met Himes recently to discuss the book, his career as a music writer, and the various projects currently competing for his talents and attention.  In-Law Country was clearly a labor of love for Himes, and his enthusiasm for the music and affection for its players shine throughout it.  Yeah, Emmylou fans are going to love it.  But In-Law Country goes beyond that.  It’s more than history, more than appreciation, more than three hundred pages of liner notes.

“I’m a strong believer that a nonfiction book should make an argument,” Himes said.  “There’s something here that we haven’t understood that should be understood.  It’s a cohesive movement.  I saw this group of musicians with shared sensibilities who didn’t get the recognition they deserved because they didn’t have a catchy name.”

Himes, playing off the “Outlaw Country” moniker, coined the term “In-Law Country” for them and pitched his book idea to the folks at the Country Music Hall of Fame who immediately bit on it.  Writing the book, however, was another matter entirely.

“It took me forever to finish this book,” Himes said.  “I was really busy with deadline journalism.  The other problem was that I kept thinking of new things to say.  It became a huge manuscript.”  Too huge.  So huge that Himes had to make a deal with his publisher.  “I cut a third of it and divided the rest into two volumes,” he said.

I’m not surprised.  Himes has been prodigious throughout his long career, producing hundreds of concert and album reviews, interviews, and articles for publications such as Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, Downbeat, and Paste.  From 1977 to 2021, he was a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, covering nearly all kinds of music.  “Everything from Dolly Parton to Ornette Coleman,” Himes said.  All from his Baltimore base.

You might call Himes the “dean of Baltimore music writers,” if such an institute of higher learning still existed.  He rolled into town from Connecticut to attend Antioch College back when it had a branch here and never left.  “When I first came to Baltimore, I was disappointed it wasn’t New York,” Himes said. “But my love for the city snuck up on me, and by the time I graduated, I didn’t want to live anywhere else.”

Himes begin his career during a period in the ‘70s through early ‘80s that he described as “the best time to be a freelancer.”  Newspapers and magazines were the primary advertising venues for the music industry, which was flush with cash, and they were actively looking for people to provide copy about music to fill their pages.

When I asked him about his favorite interview over the years, Himes was hesitant to name a specific artist.  (BTW: In-Law Country is filled with great quotes, mostly culled from Himes’s own interviews with the artists.)  But songwriters and composers are clearly his favorite interviewees.

In fact, Himes himself has written or co-written over one hundred songs, many with Billy Kemp of Billy Kemp and the Paradise Pickers fame.  “I get the least recognition, but the most satisfaction from my songwriting,” Himes said.  “I think some of my best writing may be in my songs.”  This talent will be on display at An Die Musik Live in Baltimore on September 21.  As part of his Roots Café Series, Himes will be presenting some of his originals in a musical tribute to Baltimore’s favorite macabre son, Edgar Allan Poe.

The An Die Musik Live show is just one of many, many irons Himes has in the fire.  His book of collaborative poetry, Fables from Italy and Beyond, written with the former Poet Laureate of Maryland, Grace Cavalieri, was published this year and has been lauded for the quality of its verse and timeless storytelling.

Himes has a podcast, too.  (Of course, he does).  Hard Rain & Pink Cadillacs, which debuted on July 1, is a collaboration with TV/film director Mark Finkelpearl.  Himes wrote of it, “What we want to do here is a different kind of podcast and blog.  …we really wanna talk about how the music was made, why it affects us the way it does, and what it means for the rest of the music we listen to.”

Besides putting the finishing touches on the second volume of In-Law Country, he has two other music themed books in the works, including one that tells the story of Willie Nelson through an analysis of each of the 152 albums he’s released from 1954 to 2025.  Willie Nelson: All the Albums: The Stories Behind the Music drops on October 7.

Himes was quick to point out that, despite his publisher’s initial vision for the project, he didn’t want the Willie Nelson book to be an exhaustive, album-by-album annotation of the artist’s catalog.  He wanted to present Nelson’s life, which is a fascinating subject, no doubt, through the lens of his albums.  Storytelling, after all, is what country music is all about.

And it’s also In-Law Country’s greatest strength.  The most affecting parts of the book are the flourishes of humanity that Himes describes, the glimpses into the ordinary lives of country legends.  Two of its central figures, Rosanne Cash and Carlene Carter, were twelve when they became stepsisters after their parents married in 1968.  (Rosanne is the daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Cash; Carlene is the daughter of June Carter and her first husband, Carl Smith.)  The two could not have been more different and their relationship has always been complicated.  Himes writes about their summers together as teens bonding over water skiing on Old Hickory Lake north of Nashville with the man-in-black driving the boat.  (There’s an image for you.)

The In-Law Country movement revolved around Emmylou Harris, but it’s the players on the periphery that are the most interesting.  Clarence White’s journey from Lewiston, Maine to becoming a mainstay of the Byrds, sought-after session player, and one of the most influential, yet unknown guitarists of the period is particularly haunting.  White was probably on the brink of widespread acclaim when he was struck and killed by a drunk driver while loading gear into his car after a gig with his brother in 1973.

The short life of Gram Parsons is another tragedy covered by Himes.  Aside from Harris and her record producer and one-time husband, Brian Ahern, Parsons may be the person most responsible for the In-Law Country movement.  Harris picked up the pieces left in place (Elvis’s TCB band, the contemporary songs, the hippie-country ethos, etc.) after Parsons’s death and reassembled them to find unlikely mainstream success — something Parsons never would have achieved.

Another aspect of the book that bears mentioning is that the connections between the characters in the movement are like those of a Russian novel or a corner bar in Highlandtown.  They’re multiple, unexpected, sometimes romantic, messy, and deep.  The In-Law Country crowd was a polycule fifty years before the term was first uttered, and the impact their personal relationships had on their careers can’t be discounted.

Getting back to Gladwell’s argument about Wild Horses and Boulder to Birmingham, I think we can all agree that they’re both great songs, each in their own way, with their own compelling backstory.  The difference here is that readers of Himes’s book, unlike listeners of Gladwell’s podcast, understand how these songs are oddly connected to each other and to the In-Law Country movement.  Hint: The Rolling Stones were not the first band to release a version of Wild Horses.

It’s these kinds of insights that make In-Law Country so compelling.  It will be interesting to see where Himes takes his readers in volume two of the book.  In the meantime, you can catch him live at the Roots Café Singer-Songwriter Series in Baltimore, where you can always ask him yourself which he thinks is the more melancholy, Wild Horses or Boulder to Birmingham.