Author of “Cold War Country” Joins Andrew Kahrl on WTJU
By WTJU Rock
Date: 07/22/2025
Time: 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
WTJU Rock host Andrew Kahrl will have historian Joseph Thompson on “Ye Olde Tuesday Afternoon Rocke Show” to discuss his award-winning book Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism. A selection of songs based on Thompson’s work will accompany the conversation. Tune it in on WTJU 91.1FM or stream at wtju.net.
Country music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn’t just happen. This readable history reveals how country music’s Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling the music to servicemembers. Beginning in the 1950s, the military flooded armed forces airwaves with the music, hosted tour dates at bases around the world, and drew on artists from Johnny Cash to Lee Greenwood to support recruitment programs. Over the last half of the twentieth century, the close connections between the Defense Department and Music Row gave an economic boost to the white-dominated sounds of country while marginalizing Black artists and fueling divisions over the meaning of patriotism.
This story is filled with familiar stars like Roy Acuff, Elvis Presley, and George Strait, as well as lesser-known figures: industry executives who worked the halls of Congress, country artists who dissented from the stereotypically patriotic trappings of the genre, and more. Joseph M. Thompson argues convincingly that the relationship between Music Row and the Pentagon helped shape not only the evolution of popular music but also race relations, partisanship, and images of the United States abroad.
