Carrie Allen Tipton

Carrie Allen Tipton writes and lectures about classical music, American popular music, religion, and Southern culture. Her work has appeared in the Equals Record, the Curator, Black Grooves, the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and the Journal of the Society for American Music, among other places, and is upcoming in Deep South Magazine and Texas Heritage Magazine. Following a Ph.D. in Musicology and a stint as a professor, she flew the coop of academia to, somewhat ironically, spend more time writing.

Archive, Culture, StoriesJanuary 9, 2014

Unbuckling the Bible Belt: “Nashville” and the Nones

By Carrie Allen Tipton

The choices and consequences on “Nashville”—ABC’s popular drama, returning on January 15—are shaped not by evangelical faith, but by redemptive crusades to achieve an awkward, messy, and ambiguous sense of moral and musical purity. By exchanging the role of traditional southern Christianity for postmodern Bible Belt spirituality, the show brings the South into conformity with the shifting demographics of the rest of the country.