PLACE-MAKING THROUGH HERITAGE TOURISM: A TRADITION OF MUSIC AND CULTURE OF COMMODITY IN APPALACHIA

Abstract

Appalachian regional identity is often reduced in mainstream media representations and the popular American imagination to the political conservatism of “red state” America, the vestigiality of “coal country,” or the prejudiced whiteness of “Trump country.” A closer look at heritage tourism representations in South Central Appalachia offers more nuanced connections among culture, capital, and senses of place than such portrayals afford. Foregrounding indexical relationships between culture and place through themes of birth, home, death, faith, and community, the representations in heritage tourism venues along The Crooked Road: Virginia's Heritage Music Trail derive meaning and value from literal grounding in the rural landscapes of Appalachia, establishing musical tradition as an inalienable possession of that place. This paper elucidates the role of commerce and the commodity form in these heritage-authenticating semiotic relations, taking as object of analysis the discursive, visual, and artifactual offerings of three of the heritage trail's major venues and situating them among critical political-economic perspectives on place, space, the local, and the global. The value of place as an inalienable commodity in a global space of proliferating and alienable commodities, required for heritage tourism to work as a revenue generator, finds reflection in representations of the successful transformation of an originally folk music into a commercial form. Additionally, nostalgic displays of older commodities assert the traditional value of the music while simultaneously imbricating it in a larger historical and contemporary valorization of commodity consumption.