Country music culture: from hard times to heaven

Abstract

Since its beginnings in the 1920s, country music has soared beyond an almost exclusively regional audience to become America's most popular form in the 1990s. Seventy years of regional modernization have framed it for broad appeal in today's popular culture. Here is a fascinating book that offers perspective on contemporary country music's stars, promoters, and fans. It probes deeply to learn how a vibrant country music culture evolved from rustic radio programs to become aggressive promotion of recording artists and an extended network of performers and fans unparalleled in other forms of popular music. Drawing upon a remarkably diverse range of sources--literary and scholarly works, fan magazines and music business publications, biographies of country music stars, recordings, radio and television programs, and motion pictures--Country Music Culture is based on firsthand observations of more than seventy-five live concerts and public events. It provides impressive evidence of the boundless devotion an immense audience extends to its favorite music, a music that defines the culture that produced it.

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