Starting in the early 1970s, Henry Horenstein set out to photograph the honky tonk world of country music, a dying milieu characterized by songwriter Harlan Howard's epitaph: "Three chords and the truth." While Horenstein's unadorned black-and-white shots heavily cover country music's ground zero--Nashville's Ryman Auditorium and, just across the alley, Tootsie's Orchid Lounge--they also peer into joints all across the country: Boston's Hillbilly Ranch gets as much exposure as Austin's Continental Club and Fais Do-Do in Marksville, La. His photos focus on the people in the honky tonks, not just the photo-cluttered walls and linoleum tables. Under Horenstein's generous eye, the honky tonks are revealed as places for inexpensive pleasure and escape, where not-so-famous entertainers mingle with even less famous patrons, and beer bottles cluster behind the smoke of cheap cigarettes. If "it wasn’t God who made honky tonk angels," as Kitty Wells sang, it's Henry Horenstein who has made them look good. --Bruce Jacobs