Commerce, Culture and Creativity: Songwriter Practice and Tactics in Nashville, Tennessee

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the understanding of individuals involved in songwriting within genre specific commercial cultures. I focus on the members of the songwriting community in Nashville, Tennessee, who are charged with writing original songs that audiences can authenticate. Country music has always been made according to commercial parameters, yet it is often adhered to as the longstanding vernacular expression of a distinct people (however loosely defined this collective might be). It is thus how songwriters both perpetuate and bring innovation to a longstanding commercial culture that I explore here. This study is the culmination of research done in Nashville between 2010 and 2012, conducting interviews and attending concerts, workshops, classes, and social events involving songwriters. It presents a perspective not represented in any scholarship to date: of Nashville and Music Row as experienced by the members of its songwriting community. I outline a context and theoretical framework through which my informants and their ilk, and the meaning and significance of their work, can be most relevantly understood. I contend that songwriters in Nashville work within the commercial and cultural parameters endemic to the physical and social environment they share; yet they collectively create temporary social spaces within which to write songs that listeners can then make meaningful for themselves through the act of consumption. Nashville songwriters' working processes complicate - and ultimately become an argument for the eradication of - long-held binaristic views that narrowly position popular songs as either sincere and authentic art objects or mass mediated commodities intended to manipulate listeners. Commercial, cultural and creative factors intertwine and interrelate to embody the complex milieu and form the unique figure that is the focus of this study: that of the Nashville songwriter.