So many good points have been raised in this discussion
that I hardly know where to jump back in (and I'm
especially sorry that my computer tells me I have 23
minutes to respond before my battery runs out).

[Michael Wood writes:

>"Whether preserved by archivists or commercial interests,
>the underlying music remains. Whether adopted by a new
>audience or maintained by the original audience, the
>underlying music remains. The apparent change lies in
>our viewpoint and metacognition, not in the original
>art."]

I couldn't agree more, and I think this relates also
to Bill Malone's observation, with which I also heartily
agree, that I have "adopted the Nashville or industry
definition of country music." I do regret, though, that
I (very unintentionally) gave the impression that I think
there are or should be litmus tests about what constitutes
country, so let me clarify a few points where I think I
might not have gotten my point across.

First, I can't think of a single statement about origin,
style, visual aesthetic or any other intrinsic performance
characteristic that would apply to every artist in the
country music canon, even that portion of the canon that we
might regard as universally uncontested. It's for this very
reason, in fact, that I think musicological definitions can't
be used to determine genre boundaries.

I have adopted the industry's definition of country music
because I think that it is only in industrial terms that genre
boundaries actually make much sense, and this is why I agree
with Michael Wood that the central issue is "our viewpoint and
metacognition." Before the preservationists and record men
arrived on the scene, rural vernaculars seem best described as
one big practice that encompassed what we now think of as the
separate categories of blues, folk, country, etc.

Stories abound of artists resisting outsiders' attempts to
restrict variegated repertoires in order to correspond to
preconceived marketing categories (most often defined by
class and race), and I think it was and is the rare listener
indeed who chose music based on genre categories rather than a
more eclectic personal taste.

I think genre boundaries are pretty much fictive at the level
of actual practice--they are marketing categories that
correspond only very imprecisely to real cultural, aesthetic,
and social differences. As such, I really do see them as
essentially the property of the industries that make them and
the audiences that they target. They do offer social narratives
to which people subscribe, but who among us doesn't subscribe
to more than one narrative, more than one identity? This doesn't
mean the music belongs to the industry, only the power (because
that's what's at stake in this) to determine cognitive categories.

One further point of clarification: In using the term "art world"
I didn't mean to imply a "brow" distinction. I was referring to
Howard Becker's book _Art Worlds_, which describes how the
communities that take root within cultural institutions come to
common agreement about shared aesthetic values. That said, I would
also note that folk preservationists did engage in some pretty
unlovely denigration of commercial hillbilly from the outset (as
David Whisnant has so forcefully demonstrated), and that this
historical legacy actually contributed in no small part to the
country industry's embrace of commercialism as a positive value.

And now I think I can hear the collective sigh of relief about that
battery limit on my computer!

Best,
Diane Pecknold
University of Louisville

P.S.  I also didn't mean to imply that alt.country isn't country,
but that's fodder for a later post.

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