“Country Comes to Town”: Country Music's Construction of a New Urban Identity in the 1960s

Abstract

This article examines the ideas about urbanity that country music discourse produced and debated in the 1960s, and how the country music industry looked to capitalize on the genre's new association with urbanity in order to improve its image. Artists and commentators described the “Nashville sound” as more urban or “uptown,” country marketers looked to situate their expanding audience in urban areas, and the new constellation of recording studios emerged in a neighborhood which industry figures believed could be turned into an appealing tourist destination by urban renewal. These three developments were linked, I argue, by their shared investment in the notion that country music and its fans were becoming more urban, and that country's newfound urbanity was preferable to country's previous geographic and class markers. I conclude that the country music industry attempted to use urban iconography and the material urban space of Nashville to shift the genre's common associative figure away from poor, rural hillbilly and toward middle-class, urban consumers, but with only partial success.

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