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Book Cover for: Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism, Joseph M. Thompson

Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism

Joseph M. Thompson

Country music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn't just happen. This readable history reveals how country music's Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling the music to servicemembers. Beginning in the 1950s, the military flooded armed forces airwaves with the music, hosted tour dates at bases around the world, and drew on artists from Johnny Cash to Lee Greenwood to support recruitment programs. Over the last half of the twentieth century, the close connections between the Defense Department and Music Row gave an economic boost to the white-dominated sounds of country while marginalizing Black artists and fueling divisions over the meaning of patriotism.

This story is filled with familiar stars like Roy Acuff, Elvis Presley, and George Strait, as well as lesser-known figures: industry executives who worked the halls of Congress, country artists who dissented from the stereotypically patriotic trappings of the genre, and more. Joseph M. Thompson argues convincingly that the relationship between Music Row and the Pentagon helped shape not only the evolution of popular music but also race relations, partisanship, and images of the United States abroad.

Book Details

  • Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
  • Publish Date: Apr 2nd, 2024
  • Pages: 344
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.80in - 1.20in - 1.05lb
  • EAN: 9781469678368
  • Categories: United States - 20th CenturyGenres & Styles - Country & Bluegrass - GeneralMilitary - United States

About the Author

Thompson, Joseph M.: - Joseph M. Thompson is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University.

Praise for this book

Joseph Thompson tells the fascinating and forgotten story of how the Pentagon and Music Row encouraged and reinforced each other. . . . [and] reveals why this happened."--Boston Globe