Inside the Americana Genre's Identity Crisis
As the burgeoning musical format
kicks off its 18th Americana Fest, some question if the community is as
inclusive as it should be
In June of 2015, Rosanne Cash performed at Dockery Farms, an early
20th-century Mississippi Delta sharecropping cotton plantation –
recognized as one of the foundational birthplaces of the blues – that's
now a popular site for tourists wanting to soak up some blues history.
After her headlining performance, Cash approached "Cadillac" John
Nolden, a local 88-year-old blues harmonica player who had been enlisted
to perform at Cash's Dockery afterparty. "When I was behind the mule in
the cotton fields back in the Fifties," he told Cash, "we had a radio
on the porch and whenever your daddy [Johnny Cash] came on the radio we
all ran out of the fields to gather around and listen."
"I started crying," says Cash, recalling the encounter two years later. "It was like this lightning bolt of connection."
But
despite the revelatory moment, Cash is still unsettled about one aspect
of her Dockery performance. "This man has been playing the blues harp
his whole life and I owe what I'm doing to him and, yet, I'm getting all
the attention," she says. "It just struck me so profoundly how much we
need to honor him and his tradition."
Rosanne Cash's experience at Dockery is illustrative of both the
incredible potential for cross-cultural connection, as well as the
subtle racial tensions and profound power dynamics at play in the world
of roots – or Americana – music, a genre that in the last few years has
become a commercially viable format in the pop marketplace.
To coincide with this year's 18th Annual AmericanaFest, a six-day conference and music festival held in Nashville every year, Rolling Stone Country
spoke with more than a dozen musicians, industry professionals, label
executives and music historians about the state of Americana music in
2017.
With flagship artists like Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton earning CMA Awards nominations
and Number One country albums as they blur the lines between commercial
country music and its singer-songwriter-based alternative, Americana
has more mainstream visibility than ever before.
But the Americana
music machine, which in many ways still exists as a niche artistic
subset of Nashville's country-music industry, is still fine-tuning its
identity as an evolving musical community, an industry format and an
umbrella musical genre.
Much of the inherent tension comes from what some see as the growing
chasm between the reality of Americana's close connections to Music Row
and the community's insistence on selling itself not as any sort of
rebellious extension of the country music industry but, rather, as an
all-encompassing "amalgam of different cultures and multiple races," as
Americana Music Association executive director Jed Hilly puts it.
According to the organization’s website,
Americana music is a sweeping, all-inclusive home for a wide range of
American roots styles that include "country, roots-rock, folk,
bluegrass, R&B and blues."
"Americana is and always was an
umbrella term," says Craig Havighurst, senior producer at Nashville's
Music City Roots, a regular Americana radio and web showcase. "It's an
industry category and a commercial radio format that has grown to
include the big half-dozen or so American roots genres."
As one
of its touchstone artists, Rosanne Cash is deeply grateful, if not
downright effusive, when she talks about Americana. "It was like finding
this really cool island that you tell all your friends about because
the hotel is great and the weather is always sunny," she says of first
stumbling upon the genre during its turn-of-the-century infancy.
Yet it takes only a few minutes of conversation for Cash to bring up what she sees as the community's greatest shortcoming.
"The Americana community needs to embrace more black musicians," she
says, unprompted. "That's the one area where I feel it should really
strive to be even more inclusive. I, for one, wouldn't be doing what I'm
doing if there wasn't some black musician who had suffered in the
South. That needs to be honored, and if amends need to be made, they
need to be made.
"If the Milk Carton Kids and Van Morrison and
William Bell can co-exist under the same umbrella," Cash continues,
"then I think that some deeper blues artists could come under that
umbrella as well."
While the upper tiers of the Americana format
have become a haven for roots-leaning artists of color of different
generations – encompassing blues singer Keb' Mo', soul legend Mavis
Staples, roots revivalist Rhiannon Giddens, the Mavericks frontman Raul
Malo, and singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo – the demographic makeup
of this year's AmericanaFest puts the community's representational
dynamics in stark relief. A cursory search of the festival's lineup
points to a startling disparity: of the roughly 300 artists listed in
this year's AmericanaFest roster, more than 90 percent of the acts are
made up of exclusively white performers.
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