ABSTRACT
The rural music festival The Norwegian Country Meetingand the urban country music club and record label Die With Your Boots On each represents key stakeholders and concert arenas in the contemporary field of Norwegian country music. However, as cultural operators, they exercise their respective aims and ambitions, resources and responsibilities in distinct and differentiated ways. While the festival has been partly bound up by structural policies and regional expectations, the club has operated with a higher level of autonomy and has had more power in defining what counts as legitimate country music in Norway. Starting from a Bourdieusian analytic perspective, this chapter examines what types of country music represent whom and the consequences of these relationships. The analysis and discussion build on data from an ethnographic PhD study (Vestby, 2017) centred on the dynamics between the cultural politics of democratic cultural policy and the structural implications of musical gentrification.
