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The people, politics, and preservation battles behind saving America's most storied music sites.
Don't Lose Your Good Thing explores how the places that shaped American popular music are essential to understanding the nation's broader history. From the Gennett and King Records buildings in the Midwest to Stax and Capricorn Studios and the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in the South, Charlie B. Dahan examines how these sites of musical innovation have been preserved, neglected, or reborn. Drawing on years of archival research, fieldwork, and interviews, the book combines public history and music industry insight to reveal how the struggle to save these landmarks reflects larger stories of creativity, race, labor, and community in America. It shows why the spaces where music was made remain vital to preserving our shared cultural memory.
"Don't Lose Your Good Thing is one of the most satisfying cultural histories I have read in some time. Dahan takes the histories of five iconic music studios and museums, adds insights taken from the literature of historic preservation, community-rooted public history, and American pop music history and produces a cross-disciplinary study of exceptional merit. With the twenty-first-century bulldozers of development and technology always standing ready to wipe away distinctiveness of sound and experience, his reminder that we will lose the 'good thing' if we don't respect and preserve the actual places where those sounds were produced is both timely and necessary. This book is an invaluable study of the places that really matter to our cultural traditions." — Carroll Van West, Director Emeritus, MTSU Center for Historic Preservation
"Charlie Dahan makes clear why recording studios should be preserved alongside presidential birthplaces and battlefields: their impact on American culture is similar, and the sense of place is essential. At a time when nearly every recording is just a click away, this book reminds us that the walls where the music was made can talk, and that there's an audience that wants to listen." — Robert Gordon, author of Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion
"Charlie B. Dahan's important work accomplishes a seemingly impossible goal. He details a series of complex stories of historical preservation with clarity and precision while also making an impassioned argument for the importance of recording studios—and the music that came from them—as an essential part of our national heritage. This is a compelling and thought-provoking book." — Charles L. Hughes, author of Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South
Charlie B. Dahan is Professor in the Department of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University. A former A&R Director at Shanachie Records and booking agent, he is the coauthor, with Linda Gennett Irmscher, of Images of America: Gennett Records and Starr Piano and compiler of the Gennett Records Discography.