Making Music in Music City: Conversations with Nashville Music Industry Professionals by John Markert

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making Music in Music City: Conversations with Nashville Music Industry Professionals by John Markert Joseph M. Thompson Making Music in Music City: Conversations with Nashville Music Industry Professionals. By John Markert. Charles K. Wolfe Music Series. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 218. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-62190-644-5.) How does Nashville's music industry take something as abstract as an idea for a song and turn it into the finished products that we stream, download, or catch on the radio? Sociologist John Markert's recent work answers that question by studying the people who go to work every day in Music [End Page 433] City, churning out those songs and making the machinery of the modern industry hum. What emerges from his book is a portrait of Nashville's music business from top to bottom, with an expected, although not exclusive, emphasis on the production of country music. Markert interviewed more than a hundred informants, ranging from songwriters and publishers to producers and talent bookers. Their stories offer personal accounts of a billion-dollar industry that too often remains obscured by cowboy hats and down-home personas. Markert's book complements current scholarship by historians and musicologists who research music-making as labor and Nashville's Music Row as a commercial industry, particularly Charles L. Hughes's Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill, 2015) and Travis D. Stimeling's Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City (New York, 2020). Yet Markert helps fill two gaps in the country music literature. His chronological scope focuses on the 1990s to the present, enhancing our understanding of Music Row after its well-documented rise to prominence in the 1960s. Additionally, his methodology as a sociologist grants his informants space to speak for themselves, allowing readers to hear about the capriciousness of success from the people who do the hard work of turning music into merchandise. The book's structure follows the music production process itself. Markert begins by sharing interviews with songwriters who regularly perform at song swaps known as "writers' rounds" held at bars and cafes around Nashville (p. 24). These gigs allow writers to form collaborations in which veterans mentor and glean inspiration from newcomers, while newcomers learn the business from established hitmakers. Those collaborations create key strategies for success in the country music world and reflect the intergenerational ties that bind these songwriting networks. Once the writers have finished a song, their work needs a publisher. Music publishers choose songs to shop for recording artists and sign promising songwriters to long-term contracts for rights to their material. Markert's conversations with the people involved in this sector of the business reveal the combination of luck and determination necessary to place a song on a country record. After a performer has chosen a song, they then book a studio and hire musicians to back them. Historians have documented the origins and function of Nashville's studio system, but Markert examines the musicians who made up this labor force during country music's boom years of the 1990s. He closes with the experiences of managers who wrangle performers' public images and the concert promoters who organize how artists deliver their songs to their audiences. Markert withholds much of his analysis until the conclusion, a choice that can leave the reader wanting more from the author throughout the rest of the book. He notes a gender disparity in the male-dominated realms of songwriting and publishing but barely engages in addressing why Nashville functions in such a way. Similarly, he discusses how white country artists have started incorporating influences from African American hip-hop culture but does not investigate Music Row's long pattern of marginalizing artists of color. And although writer and industry insider Don Cusic contributes a historical overview of the country music business as an introduction, historians will long for [End Page 434] more context when reading about Nashville's recent past. Still, Markert's approach delivers valuable insights for readers interested in hearing about the winding and sometimes dead-end road to commercial success from the people who sustain Nashville's reputation as Music...