A SLICE OF AMERICANA PIE

A SLICE OF AMERICANA PIE

An expert’s overview of music’s most loosely defined genre

Holly George-Warren

It’s 5 p.m. on a sweltering July afternoon in rural upstate New York, and my friend Amy and I are stuck, bumper-to-bumper, inching down a narrow country lane toward the site of the most famous rock festival in history, 1969’s Woodstock. At this much smaller-scale outdoor gathering—Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival tour stop at Bethel Woods—nearly 15,000 of us have flocked to see Willie, Bob Dylan, and the duo of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss backed by a band led by Tulsa guitar slinger JD McPherson. Over six hours, we’ll hear country, blues, R&B, gospel, roots rock, bluegrass, rockabilly, folk, even trucker music (Dylan’s cover of Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road”). Gatherings like the traveling Outlaw Music Festival, Farm Aid, and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass present music that some of us call “Americana.” It’s a sound as comfortable as an old pair of cowboy boots—with new voices popping up that sparkle like Nudie suits.

Not so easy to put into an algorithm, Americana’s musical identity is nebulous—but with deep roots. And I can’t get enough of it. For the past 25 years, I’ve headed to Nashville nearly every September for the shindig known as AMERICANAFEST, a confab of nightly showcases, afternoon panel discussions, and an awards show at the Ryman Auditorium, legendary home of the Grand Ole Opry. It’s where I’ve discovered distinctive newbies like Orville Peck and Sierra Ferrell playing little clubs, and paid homage to longtime heroes like Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Wanda Jackson, and Bonnie Raitt, who’ve been lauded as the music’s pioneers at a ceremony honoring the breakthroughs and the trailblazers. The Americana Music Association says its mission is to promote “American roots music,” and at these get-togethers you can hear everything from blues and gospel to bluegrass, honkytonk, and what we used to W call “alt-country.” The Ryman Honors & Awards ceremony has also toasted U.K. artists like Robert Plant, Fairport Convention cofounder Richard Thompson, and country-soul belter Yola. Former MC host Jim Lauderdale, a pioneering Americana singer-songwriter himself, used to joke, “I don’t N know what it is, but I know it when I hear it!” Honky-tonk hitmaker Dwight Yoakam, the 2024 W Americana Legend honoree, told me, “There’s a certain effervescence to the whole Americana thing that deals with the exuberance of youth, when everything seemed possible—and music expressed the possibilities in life. You’re setting sail to a horizon that is unknown, but with a kind of abandon. That’s what 'Americana music’ embodies, a willingness to have a reckless abandon about things."

I can relate to that. When I moved from North Carolina to New York City in search of punk, I stumbled into a love affair with old-timey hillbilly, honky-tonk, rockabilly, and hard country (a la George Jones, who tore my heart out at the Bottom Line in 1980). A fan of Alex Chilton’s ragged rootsy album Like Flies on Sherbert, I got into the music of the Carter Family, Ernest Tubb, and Jimmy C. Newman—thanks to Chilton’s twisted covers of those artists. Alex’s gigs, more often than not, included his versions of C&W and R&B songs as opposed to tracks from his previous groups the Box

Tops and Big Star. Like the Cramps, whom he produced, Alex led the way to my embrace of, yes, Americana music.

That sound’s emotive, raw quality appealed to numerous purveyors and fans of punk rock.

“THAT’S WHAT ‘AMERICANA MUSIC’ EMBODIES, A WILLINGNESS TO HAVE A RECKLESS ABANDON ABOUT THINGS.” -DWIGHT YOAKAM

For many, the jumping-off point was the late Gram Parsons, whose stints in the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burritos Brothers in the ’60s, plus his albums with Emmylou Harris, were the template for what he called “cosmic American music.” Less than a decade after his 1973 death, bands like Rank and File—which emerged from punk band the Nuns, comprised of Alejandro Escovedo and Chip and Tony Kinman—and the Knitters—X’s Exene, John Doe, and DJ Bonebreak, plus Blaster Dave Alvin—crafted a West Coast style of honky-tonk. Alongside them, Dwight Yoakam’s 1987 LP Hillbilly Deluxe skyrocketed him from L.A.’s Palomino Club to the top of the mainstream country charts. They all rocked my twangy world in the 1980s.

All of those SoCal artists, including that “little band from East L.A.” Los Lobos, are the focus of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s “Western Edge” exhibition in Nashville. The extensive exhibit will make you a believer, as it explores the development of the L.A. version of the Americana sound beginning in the 1960s. They even reunited the Burritos’ Nudie suits—belonging to Parsons, cofounder Chris Hillman, Michael Clarke, and Chris Ethridge—last seen together being worn by those young men (all gone but Hillman) on the cover of 1969’s The Gilded Palace of Sin.

One of the Nashville exhibit’s featured artists is another favorite of mine: the terrific singer, songwriter, and guitarist Rosie Flores, who is being honored this year by the National Endowment of the Arts National Heritage Fellows, “our nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts,” according to the NEA website: “Her groundbreaking talent helped lay the foundation for what has grown into the alt-country movement.” She’s also a badass guitarist who shreds the blues and rockabilly, and coaxed Wanda Jackson to play clubs rather than churches in the mid-1990s. After Rosie’s family moved from Texas to Southern California, Rosie cut her teeth as a teenager at the Palomino, winning amateur night with her guitar and vocal prowess. After playing in the all-gal punk-meets-C&W band Screamin’ Sirens in the early ’80s, she was a ringleader on the “cowpunk” scene in L.A. alongside Jim Lauderdale, Dwight Yoakam, and others. She’s never stopped rockin’, playing festivals and clubs around the world, and is a highlight of the annual Outlaw Country Cruise, where I’ve seen her play the 1 a.m. set in all her rockabilly filly splendor.

Back in the ’90s, alt-country became a thing and I jumped on board, checking out all the bands passing through New York—many hailing from the Midwest: Formed in 1987 by Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy in Belleville, Illinois, Uncle Tupelo covered the Carter Family's 1930-vintage “No Depression,” a name then adopted by an online zine and now quarterly mag covering the scene originally activated by the band’s throwback but noisy sound. After Uncle Tupelo’s demise, the combo spawned Farrar’s country-rockish Son Volt and Tweedy’s multidimensional Wilco. Other groundbreaking y’alternative artists include Nashville’s BR-549 (cofounded in 1993 by Kansan Chuck Mead). BR-549 turned Music City’s derelict lower Broadway into a hipster hot spot with their weekly stints among the PBR-swillin’ and bologna-sandwich-eatin’ crowd at Robert’s Western World. Chuck Mead wrote the scene’s anthemic “Little Ramona,” a track on their 1996 self-titled debut album: “Her punk rock records are gathering dust/Little Ramona’s gone hillbilly nuts.” (Their debut also includes a killer version of Gram Parsons’ “Hickory Wind.”) Though the band broke up, Mead performs and records, sometimes backed by the Grassy Knoll Boys, and also served as music supervisor of the Tony-winning Broadway show Million Dollar Quartet. Another Midwesterner— Detroit’s Jack White—relocated to Nashville, gave up his Stripes for country-tinged sounds, and produced transcendent albums by country empress Loretta Lynn (Van Lear Rose} and Wanda Jackson (The Party Ain’t Over}. Personally, I prefer his twang over his metallic Sturm und Drang.

The ’20s have brought a new, diverse crop of Americana artists—all of whom kick butt live. Texan Kacey Musgraves and Washingtonian Brandi Carlile are blessed with songwriting chops and gorgeous voices, and have cleaned up on Grammys, while being snubbed by mainstream country radio. North Carolina’s answer to the Louvin Brothers (without the sibling animosity), the Avett Brothers have built a huge audience with constant touring, an HBO documentary directed by Judd Apatow, and stellar songcraft. The third of their 11 albums, 2004’s Mignonette, is the source for an imminent Broadway musical. Canadian transplant Allison Russell created a Nashville-based movement of LBGTQ+ and POC artists with her community-building and tremendous songwriting and vocals. Her debut, Outside Child, earned 2022’s Americana Album of the Year, and its follow-up The Returner yielded the track “Eve Was Black,” winner of the 2024 Best American Roots Performance Grammy. Six-time Grammy-winning Alabaman Jason Isbell found his true calling as an Americana singersongwriter, backed by his band the 400 Unit, after a stint in Muscle Shoals-born storytelling roots rockers Drive-By Truckers. Twangy Tyler Childers, a poetic Kentuckian backed by his band the Food Stamps, broke through to headliner status at Madison Square Garden via his bluegrass-tinged vignettes of rural life. His “In Your Love” video (with 11 million views on YouTube) features a story written by novelist Silas House about a queer coal-mining couple’s tragic love.

No countryman is more outspoken about queer love than South African-born, Canadian-raised Orville Peck, known for his fringed masks and eye-catching Western wear. Following 2019’s Pony, with its noir-esque “Dead of Night,” and 2022’s Bronco, his fetching new Stampede finds him trading vocal licks with 16 different duet partners, ranging from Kylie Minogue to Elton John to Allison Russell. A crowd-pleasing highlight is his collaboration with Willie Nelson, “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other." Former Texan and Lower Manhattanite Ned Sublette penned it back in 1981 and recorded it in Lubbock in 1984 with steel guitarist Lloyd Maines and Dylan’s future bandleader/bassist Tony Garnier. The song “traveled through the indie-punk-queer underground,” says Sublette, “with Pansy Division and others recording covers of it.” It eventually reached Nelson, who loved the song and cut it in 2006. Peck chose it for his tribute to Willie during the legend’s star-studded 90th-birthday concert at the Hollywood Bowl last year. Thrilled by Peck’s version, Nelson suggested they cut a duet and film a video of the song, which kicked off what became Stampede. The track has already surpassed more than 2.5 million streams on Spotify alone.

A 21st-century Jack Kerouac meets Loretta Lynn, Sierra Ferrell rode the rails out of Charleston, West Virginia, and spent time as a street singer in New Orleans. After relocating to Music City, her Appalachian vocals and character-driven songs hit locals hard at the Post 82 American Legion Hall. She signed to Americana’s longest-running label, Rounder, releasing the captivating debut Long Time Coming in 2021. This year’s iridescent Trail of Flowers has catapulted her to the top of the Americana radio chart with the bittersweet track “American Dreaming."

From Sierra Ferrell's high lonesome yowl to Willie Nelson’s deep Lone Star croon, Americana music is as expansive as Nelson’s voluminous catalog (152 albums at last count). The genre has room for all kinds of artistic expression, including Beyoncd’s Cowboy Carter. And still “setting sail to a horizon that is unknown,” Dwight Yoakam’s first single from his forthcoming Brighter Days features a twangnificent duet with rapper Post Malone, “I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom).”

When it comes to pinpointing the Americana sound, perhaps the 2023 Americana Awards Legend recipient Bonnie Raitt put it best: “It’s all the stuff I like.”