ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Hank Walters and a small core group of musicians involved with country music in Liverpool during the early to mid-1990s. It examines how a music genre that originated in America's rural south was claimed and promoted as the heritage of Liverpool, a provincial city in north-west England. Country musicians in Liverpool were tapped into local, regional, national and international country music networks. Country music appealed particularly strongly to groups and neighbourhoods in North Liverpool. Those neighbourhoods had always been in flux. Country musicians expressed strong feelings of attachment and of belonging to Liverpool in various ways. An emphasis on local identity was also evident in discussions about the origins of the local country scene. Hank Walters and Bernie Green frequently argued about who had been the first to start off country music in Liverpool, and each was convinced that it was himself.
