Radiophonic Country: Broadcast Aesthetics and Belonging in Twenty-First-Century Country Music

Radiophonic Country: Broadcast Aesthetics and Belonging in Twenty-First-Century Country Music explores the dominance of radio in country music, and the alternative pathways musicians take away from mainstream airplay. In a genre landscape dominated by the big business of radio play, Billboard charts, mainstage awards, trade associations, and Nashville record labels, I ask how country musicians and professionals navigate radio’s financial and cultural omnipotence in the industry. Terrestrial radio underpins commercial success in country today, whereas all other popular music genres rely on streaming numbers to determine chart success. Through ethnographic case studies and readings of media texts, I argue that many country musicians and professionals experience their work through a radiophonic lens, producing and performing songs shaped by the liveness and intimacies of growing up listening to country radio. This radiophonic nostalgia pushes my interlocutors to reimagine contemporary radio, carving alternative pathways around the medium’s exclusionary and rigid practices, a particularly important process for Black country musicians. The project traverses four case studies on radiophonic country; two public radio music programs, NPR Tiny Desk Concerts and A Prairie Home Companion; a historic old-time, bluegrass, and gospel music station, WPAQ, in Mount Airy, North Carolina; a Nashville-based country music collective, Black Opry, and Beyoncé’s 2024 album Cowboy Carter and her subsequent international tour Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit.

The dissertation is split into two parts, with the first examining the work of musicians and media workers who craft a sense of place through radiophonic liveness. The second half of the dissertation explores the ways Black country musicians contend with commercial terrestrial radio’s exclusionary practices, creating a liberatory space for themselves in radio. In Chapter One, I explore the cultural and sonic synergy between public radio and country music, analyzing the performances of country musicians on NPR’s video series Tiny Desk Concerts and the nostalgic, fictional work of Garrison Keillor on his long-running radio program A Prairie Home Companion. In Chapter Two, I document how WPAQ maintains an ongoing commitment to liveness on the air, sounding country radio’s past in barn dance variety shows, and integrating the history of the station into the sociality of the present. The third chapter investigates how Black Opry musicians navigate radio discrimination, in so doing facing pressing issues of belonging, place, and genre in the contemporary country industry in Nashville. I argue that the Collective responds to media-based discrimination by forming collective physical and digital spaces independent of mainstream industry, by exploring radiophonic alternatives, and by sounding radio in their music. In the dissertation’s final chapter, I examine how Beyoncé’s 2024 country album Cowboy Carter constructs a moveable, audiovisual radio station for the counterculture: KNTRY Radio Texas. “Radiophonic Country” argues for the under-utilized resource of radiophonic theory as central to understanding the sounds, performances, and sociality of contemporary country music.