My Life in a Jar ― The Book of Smo

"King of the country, boss of the stix!"

Hip Hop has long made braggadocio a work requirement, often for the same "show" factor that arrives when aspiring rappers rent jewelry and nice cars to wear and drive in their music videos. With Big Smo, everything about him as a superstar is authentic: from the farm in middle Tennessee he shot the majority of his music videos, television show, and continues to live and raise his three daughters on to the family Moonshine recipe and even the head of a live chicken he personally cut off to great controversy in his now legendary Kickin' It in Tennessee video.

By far the biggest star of the country rap genre he helped invent and put on the national map with the help of well over 70 million Youtube views, he remains the first and only country rapper to date to ever sign a major label record deal with Warner Bros. With a catalog of 10 albums, including highlights like American Made, Kuntry Livin, which spawned the hits Workin' and Anything Goes, We the People, and Special Reserve among other fan favorites, Smo cultivated a fervent fanbase—affectionately referred to as Kinfoke—and brought them to the mainstream as the grassroots fire was soon blazing hotly enough to capture the Wall Street Journal's attention.

A natural ambassador for his listeners' lifestyle with a star personality so charismatic he wound up with his own A&E reality show—another first for his genre—more than 2 million fans made it so officially when The Big Smo Show debuted in June 2014 on A&E and ran for two seasons. Now, Smo tells all in My Life in a Jar: The Book of Smo.

Award-winning music biographer Jake Brown has written 44 published books since 2001, featuring many authorized collaborations with some of rock's biggest artists, including 2013 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Heart (with Ann and Nancy Wilson), living guitar legend Joe Satriani, country music legends Merle Haggard and Freddy Powers, heavy metal pioneers Motorhead (with Lemmy Kilmister), late hip hop icon Tupac Shakur (with the estate), celebrated Rock drummer Kenny Aronoff, Legendary R&B Producer Teddy Riley, Country Rap star Big Smo, late Funk pioneer Rick James, the superstar country music anthology Nashville Songwriter, all-star Rock Drummers anthology Beyond the Beats, all-star rap producers Hip Hop Hits anthology, and the all-star rock producers anthology Behind the Boards, among others. Brown is a regular contributor to Tape Op Magazine (including the 2016 AES Cover Story with Smashing Pumpkins mastermind Billy Corgan) has also appeared as the featured biographer of record on Fuse TV's Live Through This series and Bloomberg TV's Game Changers series, and received national press in Rolling Stone Magazine, CBS News, USA Today, MTV.com, The Hollywood Reporter, Parade Magazine, Billboard, etc. In 2012, Brown won the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards in the category of Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research.