Americana Music Triangle launch includes TN - The Tennessean
, an important site in blues music history The Triangle encompasses the birthplaces of nine uniquely American genres of music, from rock and roll to zydeco to country, initiative founder Aubrey Preston told a nearly full theater. Preston, the Fork philanthropist who stepped in to save Nashville's RCA Studio A , said the project was spurred by talks over the past several years about how best to preserve the region's broad-ranging musical heritage. Over the course of his preservation work, he said, the question struck him: "How could all of those genres come from one little slice of the world. The answer, he said, seemed to lie in the South's historic status as a cultural melting pot — though an often roiling one, resulting from conflict and slavery — and its connectedness via the region's river system. Still, Preston said, music has always served as a kind of universal language. "The cool thing about musicians is that they're kind of peace-makers," he said. So, with the help of historians, artists, tourism leaders and digital media experts, he said, he developed the plan to promote the region online as a global music hub. American music, he said, "is probably the strongest cultural export we have in this world. While he didn't say how much the initiative cost, he said new technology allowed organizers to widen the project's scope. "We're doing something that would cost how many millions of dollars if you had to do it the old way," he said. Source: www.tennessean.com
