One of the most consistently popular TV shows of the '60s, The Beverly Hillbillies portrayed the culture clash that took place when a family of poor country people struck it rich and relocated to L.A. But by the time the show reached the air, that phenomenon was hardly a novelty—not because of black gold or Texas tea, but music. Western swing, singing-cowboy movies, and the growing country-western market allowed many musicians to make their fortunes in Hollywood, in the process redefining what it meant to be a country star. Or, more specifically, what it meant to look like one. "They had never had money before, and they could afford the best clothes, and they wanted to stand out," memoirist and former Rolling Stone editor Debby Bull writes in Hillbilly Hollywood, an attractively packaged overview of the relationship between fashion and music in the golden age of Los Angeles country. "So they did a hillbilly thing: They got the smart gabardine wool suits with all the fine tailoring, and they put big, bright flowers all over them." The classic western look was an unlikely synthesis of Native American attire, rodeo get-up, Hollywood glamour, and the creativity of a small group of Eastern European tailors. Its glorious gaudiness is summed up no better than in the clothes of Spade Cooley's vocalist Carrot Top Anderson, liberally emblazoned with a slightly malevolent-looking dancing carrot. In a perfect meeting of the minds, stars such as Roy Rogers, Rose Maddox, Buck Owens, Hank Thompson, Porter Wagoner, and (later) Gram Parsons knew that stars should be considerably larger than life, and tailors such as Nathan Turk and Nudie Cohen knew how to make sure they looked the part. Alternating interview excerpts with a generous selection of photos depicting classic western clothes and the stars who wore them, the coffee-table-friendly Hillbilly Hollywood may not be the definitive study of the time, but a picture of minor star Ferlin Husky decked out in a Nudie suit covered in sleds and husky dogs (get it?) says more about that moment in music history than pages of text ever could.