PROPOSAL TYPE
Roundtable
SEEKING
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
- Seeking Specific Expertise
RELATED TOPICS
- Memory
- Archives
- Oral History
ABSTRACT
Nashville jumps from local musicians, with big band pop tunes and piano boogie, to an industry town, replete with new independent studios, pressing plants, and session musicians. Using oral history with material culture and traditional archival digging, this research examines how local labor in the 1950s and ’60s, casually dismissed by coastal corporate offices as backwards, created a new international center of business, built on talent from R&B, southern soul, and rock&roll.
DESCRIPTION
Reframing the impact of the local music communities in the site internationally known as the home of country music, my research tackles issues of labor and cultural economy, public memory, cultural geography, using oral history and archival practice to preserve these histories.
As I pivot more directly into the dissertation phase, I have tested numerous approaches at professional association conferences alongside my own labor. Working as a Graduate Assistant at Center for Popular Music, as well as a current residency at a small community house museum in North Nashville, a historically black neighborhood, allows me access to materials and stories that help provide an alternative narrative, if not directly contrary, to the dominant history of Nashville’s industrial development.
Pulling in from public history practice, as well as an interdisciplinary methodological approach, I’m looking for other panelists with history in the preservation and presentation of popular music and its social and cultural impacts, specifically within a local and regional lens. Pulling from scenes studies in sociology finds parallels to community approaches in bottom-up local histories, while also incorporating musicological elements related to styles, presentation, and content.
My current research focuses on rock & roll in Nashville from 1955-1970, where oral history in particular provides a critical link beyond uncovering lost facts and details. This generation satisfied growing labor demand for talented studio musicians, engineers, and eventually producers. Starting in driveways and ending in nightclubs in seedy Printer’s Alley downtown or black nightclubs in North Nashville, these groups include some of the first instances of integrated ensembles in a segregated South. The involvement of young women as songwriters, vocalists, and even industry heads reflected a changing time.
In the purview of this topic proposal, I’m specifically looking for roundtable participants with parallels with other precedents in music studies, social history, and cultural production, as I look to understand how best to preserve, present, and continue the work through the dissertation and on to other methods of exhibition and elaboration. Help focusing or elaborating on this proposal and any guidance from other pursuing similar ways of knowing cultural production would also be much appreciated.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly:
Jon Sewell, Middle Tennessee State University, [email protected]
All feedback and offers of assistance should be sent by June 5, 2026. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
As you seek additional panelists, I would be mindful that NCPH does not usually accept traditional panels where ones research is presented – rather they seeks sessions that are practical, engaging, and discuss how the work interacts with various publics. If you can tie your research to specific, more public-facing engagement, then I think you have a solid topic idea. But if it’s a session with different individuals presenting on their own research into a historic topic (even if it uses modes of public history sources i.e. archives, oral histories, etc.) then you may have a hard time getting accepted.