Country Comes to Town

Jeremy Hill ’98 argues that country music has found such expansive success because its songs and its people have forcefully addressed social and cultural issues as well as geographic change. In Country Comes to Town: The Music Industry and the Transformation of Nashville (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), Hill demonstrates how the genre and its fans developed a flexible idea of “country,” beyond their rural roots, and how this flexibility allowed fans and music to “come to town” to move into and within urban spaces, while retaining a country “character.”