Afterword

The Afterword briefly considers the impacts of the Nashville Sound era’s recording industry on the city’s role as a major center for the production of not only country music, but a wide range of commercial popular musics, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These impacts were felt not only as new generations of session musicians took the reins from the Nashville veterans, but as other emergent country music scenes—as well as the artists associated with the so-called “Outlaw country” movement—worked to distinguish themselves from the Nashville music industry. This chapter closes with a discussion of the value of engaging meaningfully with session musicians in the study of popular music, more generally.