Class on Tour: An Experiential Approach to Teaching and Researching Popular Music

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Teaching popular music at Vanderbilt University has provided me with the opportunity to interact with students and the city of Nashville through an immersion into the country-music tradition and the music-tourism industry. My interests in music tourism, popular music, and fandom, as well as my close proximity to the many sights and sounds associated with the birth and continuance of country music, led to my development in 2009 of a university course titled “Music City Museums and Memorabilia,” an onsite and ethnographic study of music tourism and country-music fandom in Nashville, which is offered during the summer term each year. In the class, students are given the opportunity to observe, analyze, and participate in Nashville’s active musical and fan community through onsite lectures and tours of the city’s places of performance, production, and preservation. The result is a course that covers the history of the music and tourism industries using an experiential approach and, at the same time, addresses the sociology of fandom through observation and participation. Through teaching the class, I have come to better understand the importance and meaning of country music to the many fans who make annual pilgrimages to Music City, as well as the importance of the fan community in the production and preservation of Nashville. The opening chapter will discuss my experiences in teaching the class, my acceptance of Nashville’s tourist identity, and my own placement within its multi-faceted music brand. These accounts serve as an introduction to the many topics of tradition, transformation, tourism, and fandom addressed throughout the book. This chapter also documents my own multiple roles as researcher: tourist, tour guide, music fan, local, and educator. In this introduction, I present the key themes and arguments and an explanation and analysis of my participatory fieldwork methodology.