Lecture & Book Signing With Author Joseph M. Thompson

FREE ADMISSION! Join the Stax Museum for a special book signing and discussion with the author of "Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism," Joseph Thompson.

Featuring author and Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University, Joseph Thompson, this event is a unique opportunity to gain insight into the intersection of music, military history, and cultural dynamics. Mark your calendars for an evening of education and discussion around the ties between Nashville Music Row and the Pentagon.

Country music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn't just happen. This readable history reveals how country music's Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling the music to servicemembers. Beginning in the 1950s, the military flooded armed forces airwaves with the music, hosted tour dates at bases around the world, and drew on artists from Johnny Cash to Lee Greenwood to support recruitment programs. Over the last half of the twentieth century, the close connections between the Defense Department and Music Row gave an economic boost to the white-dominated sounds of country music while marginalizing Black artists and fueling divisions over the meaning of patriotism.

This story is filled with familiar stars like Roy Acuff and Elvis Presley, as well as lesser-known figures such as Stax's biggest country artist, O.B. McClinton. Joseph M. Thompson argues convincingly that the relationship between Music Row and the Pentagon helped shape not only the evolution of popular music but also race relations, partisanship, and images of the United States abroad.

Host or Publisher Stax Museum of American Soul Music