Abstract:
Nashville is today widely known as Music City, birthplace of a major American genre, site of active major label and independent recording, and home to diverse organizations like the Country Music Association, the Americana Music Association and the International Bluegrass Association. But where and how does music happen in Music City? This paper examines three constituent spaces of the Nashville musical identity: Lower Broadway (the street), organizing a district containing the Ryman, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Arena and the honky-tonks; Music Row (the row), the agglomeration of music business enterprise; and East Nashville (the hood), a thriving scene of musicians, songwriters and independent studios and labels. These in turn depict principles of musical differentiation both between and within cities: legacy, industry and scene. These spaces allow us to map in real geography the definitive symbolic dichotomies of popular music production and preservation. I show how they oppose one another, but also how they are mutually constitutive.
