"Country music" only became a general description of country music in the 1950s, when the scope and nature of the genre was recognizable, the most popular physical appearance of the performers was understood, and the characteristics of the audience were understood (Peeter - poeg, 1997, p. This music could be more accurately described as folk music, as it was originally a series of non-commercial styles spread among white farmers by word of mouth, but as "folk music" became normalized, the term "folk music" was "discarded". The imagined places of country music were "the landscape of nostalgic salvation and escape from the cold, impersonality of the contemporary cityscape" (Lewis, 1997, p. Special events are certainly not limited to music, with writers' festivals (such as Byron Bay, NSW), gourmet wine and food festivals (such as Mudgee, NSW and Mornington Peninsula, Victoria) and specialty festivals (such as the Jacaranda Festival, Grafton) . 199). ). 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
) . Festivals have been one means of positioning places in national media landscapes, not only attracting tourists, but also changing the identity of places in ways that counter representations of rural decline and create a sense of community (Duffy, 2000). In some cases, the connections between music and place coalesce into a definable "sound", such as the output of the music industry at different times in New Orleans, Seattle, Liverpool, Detroit and San Francisco. , atvaudeville shows, "montbilly" sheet music copies (playing and singing at home were still popular) and in theaters that showed singing cowboy films, such as those starring GeneAutry, against the iconic visual backdrop: desert landscapes.
