Jim Lauderdale, the silver-haired and spangle-suited singer-songwriter who hosts the Americana Music Association’s annual awards show, likes to punctuate his chatter with a certain exclamation: “Now that’s Americana!” Delivered with an arched eyebrow, the joke is that the genre has always been a slippery one to define. Back in 1999, when the AMA was established, the more commonly used phrase was “alt-country.” Even then, the genre’s well-lauded journal of record, No Depression**, poked fun at its loose boundaries, sticking a subhed on the cover that declared it the “alternative country (whatever that is) bimonthly.” Mississippi hill country blues? New Orleans R&B? Laurel Canyon folk-pop? Chicago cowpunk? Vintage chitlin circuit soul? Sure, everyone get in the pool.
One common refrain, in the ongoing conversation about whatever Americana is, is that it’s a grittier underdog to popular country music. The underdog part, at least, seems less true than ever: the genre has had its own Grammy category since 2009, and since 2011, its own dictionary entry in Merriam-Webster’s. As of this spring, it even has its own Billboard chart (formerly just the Folk Albums chart), though nominees and winners at this year’s ceremony—including the Alabama Shakes, Jason Isbell, Leon Bridges, Kacey Musgraves, Chris Stapleton, and Margo Price, who thanked “all the labels that passed on my album” in her acceptance for the Best Emerging Artist Award—have all done nicely for themselves by more mainstream reckonings, too. (Price’s debut Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, which finally landed with Jack White’s Third Man Records, even made history when it debuted at No. 10 on the Country Albums chart earlier this year: It marked the first time a solo female artist made the Top 10 with an initial chart appearance, without having any hit on the Hot Country Songs chart first.)
Livestreamed on NPR, the awards show is the centerpiece for the Americana Music Association’s yearly festival and conference, which has doubled in calendar length since its first year, and expanded far more in size and impact. Over the past week, according to organizers, attendance was up 24 percent for the 17th annual Nashville party, from an estimated 30,000 in 2015. Americana (whatever that is, exactly) seems to be eating pretty well these days.
Another regular tack taken in the debate about what Americana is—still putting it in opposition to “mainstream” music—is that it’s realer, more authentic. Audibly, that often seems to translate to sparer or at least more retro-feeling production, and instruments that read as distinctly country or blues, like fiddles, steel and bottleneck guitar. (Though the latter is also not universally true: Some of the festival’s biggest award-winners—like Sturgill Simpson, who took multiple honors in 2014 and 2015—double as its most intrepid, electric sonic explorers.) Topically, this can mean anti-commercialism and, judging by T-Bone Burnett’s semi-viral keynote speech from this year’s fest, anti-technology: the idea that art is pure and commerce is, to an extent, craven. Politically, it’s traditionalist but with the understanding that rebellion, resistance, and populism are traditional values. This point of view manifests in a number of ways, but none so explicit as the association’s Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award to honor, as presenter Ken Paulson (of Middle Tennessee State University’s First Amendment Center) noted, “a roll call of integrity—people who say what needs saying with their music.”
This year, Billy Bragg was the first artist who’s not American to receive the award, and he used his time on the podium to speak poignantly about his take on American values, citing the motto E Pluribus Unum to the same level of shouts as when he announced that he had come to protest music—specifically Woody Guthrie, who was also honored that night—through the Clash. “America is never greater than when it strives to live up to that high ideal,” Bragg said.
The awards show itself is one of the finest nights of music that you currently can buy a ticket to in America. At Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, a building that itself feels like it breathes history, the program delivers a cavalcade of stars. Alongside newer faces like Price, Stapleton, and Nathaniel Rateliff, presenters and performers this year included a roll call of formidable veterans, among them Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, the Indigo Girls, John Prine, Dwight Yoakam, Bob Weir, George Strait, and Emmylou Harris. (The latter had her own comment on the shifting meaning of Americana: “We used to be kind of field hippies, now we’re Americana,” she said in her acceptance speech for the Best Duo or Group Award with Rodney Crowell, following their second duets album The Traveling Kind.) There were purveyors of mainstream country, alt-country, bluegrass, indie folk, freaky acid hippie jams, and plenty more—plus many who travel between those substrata, demonstrating how porous the boundaries can be.
A powerful series of tributes that opened the show, memorializing former AMA lifetime-achievement award winners taken by the apparent Musical Rapture of 2016, also served as a great dot connector. Weir memorialized Merle Haggard with the version of “Mama Tried” that the Grateful Dead had brought to the tuned-in and turned-on masses. Joe Henry played a passionate take on Allen Toussaint’s composition “Freedom For The Stallion,” which he’d helmed in the studio for Toussaint and Elvis Costello on the heartrending post-Hurricane Katrina collab, The River in Reverse.
Speaking of Toussaint, an architect of funk: the big, nebulous umbrella of Americana, when it comes to charts and awards in particular, stretches to cover music that we think of as rooted in African-American and Hispanic-American traditions. (Since the Americana Grammy started to be called the Americana Grammy, Mavis Staples, Keb’Mo, Los Lobos, the Mavericks and Toussaint have all wound up in that category, though Staples is so far the only person of color to have won it.) This is pretty right on, considering the mutual cross-pollination that is the actual history of American roots music, both past and current: Louisiana hybrids like swamp pop and zydeco; the black string band traditions mined by past AMA favorites like Rhiannon Giddens and her Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Leyla McCalla; legendary slide guitarist (and AMA 2015 honoree) Ry Cooder tuning into Chicano rockers like Thee Midniters; and the cross-genre, multi-racial bands that held it down at Alabama’s Muscle Shoals and Fame Studios, and New Orleans’ J&M. Even Beyoncé, after all, put a straight-up country song on her last album, booking Little Freddie King—a 76-year-old bluesman in New Orleans, who got there by way of a freight car from McComb, Mississippi—for its accompanying visual. As a Houston R&B singer with Creole lineage, that actually, arguably is her heritage. (Now that’s Americana!)
Americana the festival (rather than just the awards) has the room to embrace all of this, and typically it does. Last year, Giddens delivered a show-stopping performance at the awards, stamping percussively to Odetta’s version of “Waterboy,” as recorded for her stunning solo debut Tomorrow Is My Turn. This year’s festival saw performances from 82-year-old soul-blues trickster Bobby Rush and 77-year-old Stax veteran William Bell, both of whom released extraordinary albums this year (Rush with his Rounder Records debut Porcupine Meat, Bell with his reinvented Stax sound on This Is Where I Live). Both men began their careers at a time when audiences in Nashville were legally segregated. Both men are of a generation of musicians that, when they talk about gigs, say that they worked a club or a town, not that they played it. They surely worked Americana Fest: Rush scorched a packed room with the uncensored grown-folks’ Mississippi version of his show, in which he points at a backup dancer’s wiggling rear and announces, “It moves like it has sense.” Slick in his shades, fedora, and tailored suit, Bell delivered a tight and choreographed set of new cuts and classics, like 1977’s “Tryin’ To Love Two,” and strolled offstage timed to the minute.
Rush and Bell were standouts at this year’s Americana, but it probably should be noted that most of the festival’s performers of color—like the Rev. John Wilkins, a hill-country gospel-blues guitarist, and the Bo-Keys, a Memphis soul revue that includes members of the Stax and Hi Records studio bands—were also of their era. Its age diversity is an attractive thing about Americana Fest; the cross-generational respect feels organic and intimate. (Jason Isbell’s onstage embrace with John Prine at the Ryman, for example, felt like genuine mutual appreciation, not the choreographed torch-passing seen at other awards shows.) Racial diversity, especially among younger acts, though, tends to ebb and flow.
William Bell and Bonnie Raitt at this year’s awards (photo by Terry Wyatt/Getty Images for Americana Music)
Yola Carter, a black singer from near Bristol in the UK, counts those aforementioned soul survivors’ contemporaries among her influences, but represents their grandkids’ generation. At Americana, even with a travel-ragged voice, she showed off a wicked vocal honk and wail, as well as a saucy sense of humor: she introduced the warm-but-tough country-soul ballad “Born Again” as “a love song and a checklist for douchebaggery.”
Carter was also one of many Americana acts who is, in fact, not from America at all. C.W. Stoneking, the hyperactive rockabilly bluesman from Australia, was one of this year’s most heralded across-the-water visitors, but the festival always attracts a lot of acts from other countries, mostly the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (And a lot of fans—there’s a whole other Americana Music Association in the UK.) After all, English-speaking nations have always liked to play ping-pong across the water with lyric and melody, from Child Ballads to Howlin’ Wolf to the Stones to Billy Bragg. (The latter’s new album with Joe Henry, Shine A Light, is even a well-realized collection of American train songs that serves as a reminder of our country’s diverse ideals, histories, and possibilities.)
A lot of Americas, it turned out, were on display during Americana Fest. Bobby Rush and William Bell worked their way through an impossibly hard one to get to where they are today. Billy Bragg wants to remind us of one we could aspire to. And artists like Margo Price and Jason Isbell are documenting another one that’s happening in real time, mining and refining the sounds and values of America’s heritage while adding to it, too. With the election looming, as Bragg reminded us when he exhorted the crowd to vote, it’s never been a more important time to think about America, and what you want it to be—whatever that is.
