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. The chapter suggests that during those same two decades cosmopolitanism and insularity coexisted, sometimes in a state of tension within the city, and it illustrates how that tension was mediated by country music and by the local country scene. It focuses on country music in order to examine how a global popular music genre was claimed as the heritage of one particular city. The chapter considers the meaning of music heritage for country musicians in Liverpool, and the activities and circumstances through which that heritage was constructed. A sense of community was also encouraged and signified through live music performance, which was the activity most central to the scene.
