Interview with Diane Pecknold

You will notice that in nearly every interview I do on this site I ask the author for suggestions on what they feel is essential reading. In the first two interview for this site, Patsi Bale Cox and Barry Mazor, they both recommended The Selling Sound by Diane Pecknold. The book is an excellent study on the rise of the country music industry and blends elements of media studies, sociology and business history into a cohesive story that examines not country music, but the industry and its inner workings. (For an excellent review go here.) Since this book is popping up on more lists around the blogosphere, I thought I would contact the author, Diane Pecknold, and she was nice enough to do the following interview with me.

Music Tomes: When did you first become interested in country music?

Diane Pecknold: It seems like everyone who writes about country music has a story about listening to it as a youngster. I grew up in Urbana, Illinois, a tiny Midwestern university town where the rural/cosmopolitan divide was heavily patrolled. Since I (hilariously enough, in retrospect) thought I was on the cosmopolitan side, country music was not on the playlist.
Oddly, in high school I was an enormous fan of what people now might call early alt.country (I am still frequently ridiculed because I refuse to renounce Jason and the Scorchers and Lone Justice), but at the time I thought of it as specifically American punk or independent rock rather than a kind of country.

I didn’t really start paying attention to mainstream country until I met my husband after college. It was the era of New Traditionalists, and he was listening to a lot of Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam, in addition to the classics. So I came to country late, but once I gave it a fair listen, I found it a lot more interesting than most rock.

MT: Your book covers the commercialization of the country music industry and includes aspects of media study, sociological profiling and business history. Was it difficult to meld these into a cohesive narrative? How did you originally envision the book?

DP: The book was not originally supposed to be about country music at all. Country music was meant to be just one chapter in a book that explored the commodification of rural life after World War II. I was going to look at state fairs and shopping malls and tourism and a bunch of other stuff. I started with the country chapter just because it was the one I was most interested in personally, and it kept growing. I found so much incredibly rich source material that hadn’t been touched on in the literature that I couldn’t walk away from it or limit it. For that, I owe an eternal debt to John Rumble at the Hall of Fame. Country music probably would have remained just a chapter if he hadn’t shown me the Joe Allison papers. Once I saw those and the scripts for the Country Music Association trade shows, I knew I couldn’t possibly get through it all in a single chapter.

In most ways, the project had a life and will of its own. The synthesis of approaches just came naturally out of the sources. I wanted to know how people felt about the music they listened to and promoted, and the shape of the business was often an important factor in those feelings. I also found pretty quickly that people in the industry and audience (and the larger world of cultural criticism) were talking to each other, and wanted to be visible to each other, so it came together as a single story pretty clearly on its own. The only real problem from that vantage point was finding audience voices. I actually finished a complete version of the manuscript before I found the best fan material, and went back and restructured when I came across the K-Bar-T Roundup newsletter.

MT: Do you feel this was an area of study that hadn't been touched upon?

DP: There was certainly already some significant work in the area, which has since grown. Richard Peterson’s Creating Country Music did a similar kind of analysis for an earlier period. Bill Ivey’s chapter in Country: The Music and the Musicians, was also tremendously helpful, and pointed me in the direction of the CMA sales shows. Don Cusic knows just about everything there is to know about the mechanics of the contemporary industry, and had done several articles on the economics of country. So there were lots of good models for doing a business genre. But none of them offered an in-depth analysis of the moment I was most interested in. I felt that Peterson’s story basically ended before the bulk of the current industry’s institutional development took place, and Ivey’s article was obviously limited in scope. Cusic’s work at the time tended to focus on the economy of the 1990s boom. I was more concerned with figuring out what happened as Nashville became a separate industry parallel to but fully articulated with the rest of the popular music business. A lot of very entertaining and helpful exposé journalism had been written on the business during the Nashville Sound era — especially Paul Hemphill’s The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music. Joli Jensen’s The Nashville Sound had explored the dynamics of authenticity and commercialism during the period I was interested in, but I didn’t think it had given a full enough account of the basic history (mainly because that wasn’t her aim).

I also felt that most of the work out there either tacitly assumed that commercialism was a corrosive force, or at best that the concept didn’t have any cultural meaning, the way authenticity did. And I thought the audience had gotten short shrift (with the exception of Curtis Ellison’s Country Music Culture), and that most analyses had tended to portray them the way early twentieth-century cultural critics had thought of them: as passive dupes. I wanted to provide as complete an institutional history as I could — including an understanding of the way it imagined and interacted with the audience — and to try to understand better how that institutional history shaped the way the genre has been viewed.

MT: Why do you feel what you write about is important?

DP: I’ve always been a big fan of popular music, and it has always seemed to me that blanket condemnations of commercialism don’t accomplish much. The truth is we rely on capitalism to expand and preserve musical practice. What can’t be commercialized (and here I mean everything from local shows and burned CDs to Sony/BMG) quickly becomes moribund. Even the die-hardest anti-commercial purists expect to get paid to show up and play, even if it’s only a few bucks. I was really interested in getting to a level of specificity about the very different forms commercialism can take and how those different forms shape production, distribution, and audience experience.

I also have a personal investment in this issue. I spent a lot of time as a teenager and young adult around people in various aspects of the music business. Needless to say, these weren’t the David Geffens of the world; they were mostly what you would call DIY independent music entrepreneurs, but many of them became very successful. I always had a hard time reconciling the evil image of “the music industry” with this set of people who were so genuinely passionate about what they did and the cultural contribution they thought they were making. Maybe because I have neither myself, I see business acumen as a kind of creativity that ought to be accorded the same respect as musical talent.

MT: You are involved with a few upcoming projects, can you give us a little information on these?

DP: I’m currently working on an edited collection about African American participation in country music. Over the past decade and a half, there’s been more and more attention to the black stringbands, banjo-playing, and the country work of people like Joe Tex, Solomon Burke and Ray Charles, but it’s scattered in articles and books in a lot of different disciplines and genres. The collection is partly an effort to bring it all together in one place as a cohesive narrative, a project
that was obviously so far beyond my expertise that it needed to be a group effort. I’m hoping to follow up with a book that is more limited in scope, focusing on the 1950s forward.