“We are Music City”: Examining the Labor Process of Tipped Workers on Nashville’s Honky-Tonk Row

Abstract

This three-paper dissertation investigates the experiences of independent tipped workers in downtown Nashville’s local gig economy through a 22-month ethnographic study of musicians and bartenders laboring in the city’s iconic honky-tonk bars. Despite facing a lack of formal protections and a complex labor market, these workers developed occupational and symbolic strategies to navigate the risks and rewards of independent and gig-ish work in an intensely competitive tourism economy. The first paper examines how independent musicians coordinated complex performances without managerial oversight or professional self-determination. It introduces the concept of narrative coordination to describe how occupational communities synchronized project-based work through interaction with shared group culture rather than formal organizational structures. While these informal systems enhanced flexibility, their fragility is revealed in moments of failure, or "trainwrecks," which paradoxically reinforced occupational norms and community boundaries. The second paper focuses on organizational control, examining how bars managed tipped labor in a context where the wage relation is informal and contingent. Through the comparative analysis of three honky-tonk bars, I develop an inductive typology of “tipping regimes” that structure workers’ access to income and recognition. While larger regimes mediated control through technical and bureaucratic means, smaller regimes relied on embedded relational frames that shaped competition, solidarity, and inequality among workers. The third paper investigates how independent workers resisted marginalization in deregulated labor markets by leveraging symbolic capital. Musicians and bartenders responded to precarity through distinct forms of symbolic resistance. Across both groups, senior workers emerged as informal advocates, contributing to a form of occupational activism that sought to reclaim agency in the absence of formal labor protections. This dissertation illuminates the symbolic and organizational infrastructure of independent service work in one of America’s fastest-growing urban economies. It offers an account of how independent workers coordinated labor, negotiated control, and asserted value in the informal spaces of the new economy, contributing to broader debates on precarity, occupational community, and symbolic power in labor sociology and the sociology of work. This work also provides valuable insights for organizing service workers in the American South.