ROOTS of Country Music

Bell, Richard

Country Music Historian

Richard Bell is a country music historian who has spent forty years researching and writing on a wide range of country music topics. 

A non-academic historian, Mr. Bell’s diligent passion for country music earned the academic community’s respect. New Mexico-born, he began collecting Ray Price, Kitty Wells and Hank Thompson records in adolescence; after listening to their music on  the Grand Ole Opry on a transistor radio.  

Moving to North Dakota after a stint in the US Army in the mid-1970s, Mr. Bell began researching Ray Price, Faron Young, Carl Smith, Hank Thompson, Kitty Wells and Ernest Tubb while they were still in their musical prime.

Frustrated by a dearth of published data on pioneer and contemporary artists, he accumulated hundreds of country and western albums, 8-track tapes, cassettes, magazines, news paper articles and memorabilia. From these sources Mr. Bell began compiling data and writing articles and artist biographies. Some of his articles have been published in Country Music Magazine. Mr. Bell wrote a self-published book on country music artists during the late-1980s.

Mr. Bell was a DJ on KROF-AM 960 radio (Lafayette, Louisiana) for nine years, where he was co-host of the Original Country Music Program. During his DJ career at KROF, Mr. Bell interviewed numerous artists, including Ray Price, Jo -EL Sonnier, Cajun music fiddler, Rufus Thibodeaux, Warren Storm, Jack Greene, the Bellamy Brothers, Tom T,. Hall, Floyd Tillman, Hank Thompson, Leroy Van Dyke, PeeWee Whitewing, Sammy Kershaw and  Tillman Franks to name just a few.  

A lifelong collector of country music, Mr. Bell's music collection includes 45s, albums, CDs and thousands of music  files.   

Because of his extensive involvement in country music in the Acadiana community (Southwest Louisiana), Mr. Bell was named Honorary Citizen of Kaplan, Louisiana in 2001.

Mr. Bell has a YouTube channel (FLASHBELL)which specializes in Original Country Music videos. As of Jan. 2012, his channel surpassed 19 million views.  

Mr. Bell is the creator, author and chief editor of this site, Roots of Country Music.

Pinson, Bob

Country Music Scholar

(1934 ~ 2003)

Bob Pinson was one of the world's foremost scholars and collectors of country music. From 1973 until his retirement in 2001, Pinson was a researcher and reference librarian for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Two years before he joined its staff, the Museum had purchased his collection of 15,000 country music disc recordings. Building upon the core collection, Mr. Pinson was primarily responsible for enlarging and caring for the Museum's record collection, which now includes approximately 200,000 recorded discs, including cylinders, 78s, 45s, LPs and CDs.

With a limited budget, Mr. Pinson built the collection through donations, exchange agreements with the Library of Congress and purchases made with an acquisitions fund he created himself by auctioning duplicate recordings.

Earlier, Mr. Pinson had served on the original board of advisors for the John Edwards Memorial Foundation (then housed at UCLA, now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Born April 29, 1934, Mr. Pinson began collecting country music in his native Texas during the 1940s and continued the practice when he moved to California. Besides collecting commercially made records, he also made field trips to the South to interview such music industry pioneers as fiddler Clayton McMichen and Knocky Parker of the Light Crust Doughboys.

Pinson's research assistance and personal knowledge were crucial to the creation of many historical collections, including the Grammy-winning 10-CD Complete Hank Williams and the Grammy-nominated, The Bristol Sessions.

One of Mr. Pinson's final projects was serving as discographical advisor and editorial collaborator with Tony Russell on the monumental reference work, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-1942, published by Oxford University Press.

Source: CMT News