Notions of a natural or "natural" connection to the non-urban landscape became normalized in country music as it moved from unrecorded folk music to mass production by entertainment companies - as if the style of music was "country" because it originated from. and the Arts, 2002). In stories about the American frontier (Whiteoak, 2003) had clear parallels and several local adaptations rasi: performers like Tex Morton, Australian Yodelling. Such estimates of music venues reflect, to some extent, the accumulation of production infrastructures, the raw number of active musicians, and the continuous recording of a relatively dense cast; in other cases, such associations are created as part of media campaigns and local marketing strategies, "invented traditions" (Hobsbawm, 1983) that have become central to the tourism industry and the music economy (Atkinson, 1997; Cohen, 1997; Gibson and Connell 200
) . . in those places or songs that mythologize specific cities in the lyrics (McLeay, 199
; Kong, 1995; Smith, 1997; Connell and Gibson, 2003). Country music has also been closely tied to American national identity, seen as "our peculiar art, [whose] inspiration comes from the heart of the nation" (Peterson, 1997, p. rural areas. Country music, you name it. Almost by definition it represented rural life, although not without doubts and insecurities or an inability to admit that the land was blameless.
