This is How We Do: Living and Learning in an Appalachian Experimental Music Scene

This ethnography traces Appalachian identity through the history of American indie music in order to broaden popular conceptions of Appalachian culture and make largely unexplored connections between Appalachian Studies and an international music underground similarly dissonant with “mainstream” American cultural understandings and projects. This thesis then explores how this history intersects with Boone, North Carolina’s local history of alternative music scenes before examining Boone’s current experimental scene. In seeking to understand the intentions and motivations of this current “non-Appalachian, Appalachian,” music scene, I explored this central question: How does learning happen in a local experimental music scene collectively engaged in negotiating and remaking disparate alternative music worlds?