Music / City ─ American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport

Jon Wynn immerses us in the music and the people of music festivals as well as the resources, organizers, and places where they occur. Is the “Nashville Sound” the rough honkytonk music of Hank Williams, or is it Chet Atkins and Patsy Cline’s mixture of rural themes and sophisticated string arrangements? Or did it morph into the “countrypolitan” of Tammy Wynette, Ray Pride, and Charlie Rich, a long distance from the feral outlaw country music of Nelson and Haggard. Wynn finds that the old fusing of the urbane and the rural to create a distinctive brand of music in Nashville presages many of the tensions found in its festival today. When Wynn compares the Nashville scene to Austin, the music of indies prevails, but just as important is the scattering of festival venues all over town, making South by Southwest a big networking party, one that even has room for guerilla events and protesters, a mix of insiders and outsiders. We find that the folk festival at Newport offers very different sounds, sights, and atmosphere. This book is engagingly “experience-close,” written by a master ethnographer who is also a musician and who has performed himself at many music festivals (including SXSW). Wynn tracks the history of three festivals (Newport, Nashville, Austin), then takes us on-site for each one to consider different festival agendas and styles of organization: from the musician looking to further her music career to the participant who wants to see his favorite band, from the mayor who wants to exploit a local cultural scene to the music executive hoping to sell records, from the locals’ frustration over corporate branding of their city to the tourist’s search for a good time. These secular festivals spark the imagination of young Americans and galvanize pilgrimages to the cities that host big-time extravaganzas. They have become celebratory rituals in America. Beyond the music and the people this book offers a very sharp perspective on urban symbolic power in action, how cities mobilize massive organizational resources to become promotional machines. It is time to reconsider these focal events to discover how they function as real social engines.

Jonathan R. Wynn is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author ofThe Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York, also published by the University of Chicago Press.