ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how an annual country music festival was the catalyst for the remarkable transformation of an Australian town: Tamworth, a major rural centre in northern NSW with a population of 43,000. Tamworth has seen extensive transformations in its economy and local identity, linked to country music, as a result of hosting a highly successful annual country music festival. By world standards Tamworth's local country music scene is actually quite small. It traces Tamworth's story: how it grew to become Australia's largest single music festival; how it leveraged off the international growth in the market for country music, as well as harness associations with rurality inherent to that musical genre; and how place images for Tamworth were produced by a particular network of institutional actors alongside the music industry, and by musicians and audiences themselves. Antagonisms emerge especially when festivals become large, but in Tamworth are associated with a genre of music that has enormous cultural and symbolic baggage.
