As country music spread from America's rural, Southern heartlands and into the
cities and pop charts in the 1970s and '80s, Brooklyn-born Eddie Rabbitt was one
of the urban cowboys who helped the genre cross over to new audiences. The son
of Irish immigrants, he was a high school drop-out working low paid jobs and
playing in Newark bars at night, until moving to Nashville in 1968 with dreams
of becoming a songwriter. On his first night in town he penned Working My Way Up
To The Bottom, which became a small hit for Roy Drusky, and he landed a job as a
staff writer for a publishing...