Introduction

Abstract In the early 1950s, country music was a cottage industry in Nashville, supporting a handful of small recording studios, publishers, and managers, and Nashville was known primarily as the home of The Grand Ole Opry. By the mid-1960s, however, Nashville had become “Music City, USA,” a bustling town known around the world as the epicenter of country music production and dissemination. As Nashville underwent this transformation, popular music consumption in the United States also underwent a radical change, as disc jockey programs replaced live performance on radio stations across the United States. Drawing upon recent academic work in the musicology of recording, the Introduction considers how these changes affected the ways that audiences heard country music during the 1950s and 1960s. In its focus on recorded country music, the Nashville Sound era begs for a musicological inquiry examining the creative decisions of session musicians, recording engineers, and record producers and the impacts of those decisions on the listeners who engaged with their work.