Country Music and the Nashville Sound
Country Music and the Nashville Sound
This chapter argues that country music lost its market share and that the Nashville industry's efforts at moving country closer to mainstream pop led to the hegemony of the Nashville Sound. The historically tense relationship between country music and national mainstream popular culture constitutes a broader background for understanding how country reacted to rock and roll. The corporate music industry became more interested in country music during the 1940s. The resistance to rock and roll is reflected in the recorded output from Nashville. The Nashville Sound was a move toward (white) mainstream pop. So although the Nashville Sound has become accepted as part of the canon, the ongoing attempts to compete with rock and pop are still critiqued by hard-core fans, who have even less power over the production and representation of the genre than they had forty years ago.
Keywords: country music, Nashville industry, Nashville Sound, popular culture, rock and roll, corporate music industry
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