Hillbilly Heart...Review

About the book:
Billy Ray Cyrus is an award-winning country music legend whose “Achy Breaky Heart” propelled his debut album, Some Gave All, to the top of the charts for a record-breaking seventeen weeks. He’s also father of Miley Cyrus, one of Hollywood’s most successful young stars, who grew up on stage and on screen, most famously as the lead on the Disney Channel’s “Hannah Montana,” where Billy Ray Cyrus played her father. But sometimes the truth is even better than fiction. Now, for the first time, fans can read about Cyrus’s tenacious and inspiring struggle to find his own way to faith, family, and the power of music.

Hillbilly Heart opens during Cyrus’s turbulent childhood in Kentucky, where he sought refuge in music and sports after his parents’ divorce. He was a troublemaker in training, known more for pulling pranks than for following in his preacher grandfather’s much-vaunted footsteps. But when he heard a voice telling him to get a left-handed guitar and start a band, this rebel found his cause. Ten years later, after tirelessly working the club circuit and knocking on the closed doors of music executives from Nashville to Los Angeles, Cyrus finally made a stratospheric breakthrough, becoming a multi-platinum selling artist and taking his rock-and-roll twist on country music to the world’s stage.

Cyrus fans have always been able to piece together the details of his life through his lyrics—the ups and downs, adventures and disappointments—but Hillbilly Heart gives them a front row seat for his most candid performance ever.

In his memoir, Billy Ray Cyrus talks about his life and his story, mostly in chronological order. He name drops, but only because a particular celebrity was a part of whatever experience or event he is talking about, not because he wanted to fill his book with celebrity names.  He shares his belief that he was guided by the voices of God and others who had died before and who told him where to go and what to do. He is open about his faith, his flaws and his failures and he is also honest about how he got to where is today and why he made the decisions he did.  Billy Ray is proud of his children as any father should be and because he and Miley acted together on Hannah Montana, there is quite a bit about Miley in the book, although I think it was published before she started making some interesting life choices herself.

This isn't flowery or even very well written, but it's honest and straight-forward and interesting.

Thanks to Amazon Vine for the opportunity to review this book.  You can learn more about Billy Ray Cyrus here. You can purchase your own copy here.

Read 5/13

* * *
3/5 Stars

Comments

  1. Hmm, I don't pay much attention to Miley Cyrus, these days, so I don't know what the interesting choices are. She's definitely been a bit of a wild child at times, though.

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