Americana 2013, Addicted To Noise
A Reflection on the 2013 Americana Festival
Addicted To Noise, October 2013
While I’d been a lover of folk, country, roots and everything in between for a long time, this year was the first time I’d been able to make it to Nashville for the Americana Awards, Festival and Conference. As someone involved in producing a much bigger event in Austin, it proved an enlightening experience.
Music lovers and musicians came from all around the globe (with a surprisingly large Australian contingent) and from a diverse age range. The event took advantage of Nashville’s great music institutions – The Ryman, Cannery Row and Grimey’s Records to name a few – and showcased some lesser known ones. The Festival welcomed a lot of people to ‘Music City’ but the three enormous Taylor Swift shows at the Bridgestone Arena overshadowed any traffic or overcrowding brought to town by Americana.
The Awards
On Wednesday night of September 18th, hundreds of fans, musicians and industry leaders from around the globe packed into the Ryman Auditorium for the 12th annual Americana Awards. Artists such as Dr John, Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell and Ry Cooder, walked the red carpet like Oscar winning celebrities – and here, in a venue with such rich roots music history, they are just as important.
Delbert McClinton, performed ‘Hey Good Looking’ – backed by the Buddy Miller led house band – and set the stage for the night’s first accolade, the ‘President’s Award’, given to Hank Williams for his contribution to the genre during the past century.
“The past matters, tradition matters,” said host Jim Lauderdale (who sports a bouffant that would make RockWiz’s Brian Nankervis green with envy). Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns presented the award to Holly Williams, Hank’s granddaughter.
“Hank would have been 90 yesterday and it was just bizarre sitting here in an empty Ryman during soundcheck and singing his songs so many years later,” she told the audience. And in moments, the past melded with the present, tradition with modernity. That Holly’s performance maybe lacked the character or intensity of Hank’s didn’t seem to matter.
This blend of old and new proved a central theme of the week. The young Charleston based duo Shovels and Rope were nominated for four awards and took home both Song of the Year for ‘Birmingham’ and Emerging Artist of the Year, while veterans Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell won duo and album of the year for Old Yellow Moon.
“Maybe we’re a bit arrogant but we feel like we were Americana before it had a name,” Emmylou joked, with more than a tinge of sincerity. When they started making music, she said, “We called ourselves field hippies”.
Robert Hunter, the head and heart behind many of the Grateful Dead’s best-known lyrics, was presented with the lifetime achievement award for songwriting. Following his acceptance, Hunter played a fragile and pared down version of ‘Ripple’, from American Beauty, another one of those great Americana albums from the time before this music had a name. It was his first public performance in over a decade.
The 1960s theme continued as Stephen Stills performed a rousing version of ‘For What It’s Worth’ along with his Buffalo Springfield partner Richie Furay. Having contributed essential pieces of Americana history, the recognition for Stills and Hunter makes perfect sense in 2013. At the same time, though, it also provides a sharp reminder of how far the genre has come in the last century. One can only imagine what Hank Williams, Patsy Cline or Roy Acuff would think of the many hippies making their mark on the Ryman’s stage.
It was Old Crow Medicine Show, however, who felt like the evening’s biggest winners. Only a night after becoming the newest members of the Grand Ole Opry, the band was presented with the ‘trailblazer award.’ Singer Ketch Secor’s acceptance speech articulated the spirit and sentiment of Americana perfectly: “Roy Acuff was no stranger to this stage and he said the thing about country music that makes it so special is that it’s not so much learned, it’s inherited,” he said. “In the 16 years we’ve called ourselves Old Crow Medicine Show, I don’t think we’ve really blazed any new trails – we just went wandering up some old ones.”
“Every few years some young pickers show up on the bill and for some cosmic reason, god knows why, are entrusted with the task of dusting off those old brittle 78s and learning the songs of America, if only to remind a new generation of how deep the music of this land of ours really runs.”
Old pickers joined forces with young pickers in the night’s finale, a performance of Rodney Crowell’s ‘Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight’ featuring Emmylou and Rodney, Rosanne Cash, Dr. John, Jim Lauderdale, Richard Thompson, Tift Merritt, Billy Bragg plus members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Shovels and Rope.
Backstage and behind the scenes, the collaborative atmosphere continued. In the Ryman’s tight corridors, young musicians met their idols and legends chatted with fellow legends, with no affectation of celebrity or snobbery. Hierarchy and age gaps felt all but nonexistent and it was clear that expressions of mutual respect and community presented onstage were not just for show.
The Festival
Using a framework similar to larger conferences like SXSW and CMJ, Americana showcases took place throughout the week in venues around the city, including the Mercy Lounge, Cannery Ballroom, The Basement, The Rutledge and The Station Inn. The 2013 lineup featured a wide range of artists, from young Nashville natives to Australian and British music scene staples.
To give a taste, the week included shows by: David Bromberg, Richard Thomson, Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale, Darrell Scott, Tim O’Brien and Howe Gelb, the Del Lords, the Bottle Rockets, North Mississippi Allstars, Caitlin Rose, Laura Cantrell, Amanda Shires, Canadians Corb Lund and Daniel Romano, in addition to emerging artists like Treetop Flyers, Steelism, John Fullbright, Mandonlin Orange, Aofie O’Donovan and many more.
With up to seven artists playing at any given time, it’s impossible to see everything. Even so, I managed to catch a number of wonderful performances.
Late on Wednesday night I diverted from the Americana trail to see some music in East Nashville, but I heard that across town 85 year old Bobby Rush brought a taste of the ‘Chitlin Circuit’ to the festival with a powerful set about cheating men and loose women”. At the Mercy Lounge, JD McPherson, kept the R&B flame burning for a younger generation.
On Thursday, Communion records (the artist run label co-founded by Ben Lovett from Mumford and Sons), presented a daytime showcase at Nashville’s grand downtown Presbyterian Church. As the late afternoon sun streamed through the stained glass windows, a young lineup, including The Lone Bellow, Bears Den, Willy Mason and Justin Townes Earle played a series of acoustic sets.
While most performers were clearly excited to be in Nashville during the festival, Justin Townes Earle – usually one of my absolute favorites – seemed thoroughly unenthused and uncharacteristically sloppy. He described his frustration at the impact Americana had on the city’s traffic flow and mentioned his plan to drive to Utah that night. These comments came as a surprise to me, having noted how minor the festival’s footprint seemed just hours before.
Rosanne Cash used her packed Thursday night showcase at 3rd and Lindsley to play her new album, The River and The Thread (due for release in Jan 2014). The songs are an ode to the American south, reflecting Cash’s feeling of ‘homecoming’ on returning to this part of the country – almost making piece with the south and its culture after relocating to New York many years ago. And as the state where Rosanne and her dad Johnny were born, Nashville, Tennessee seemed like no better place for it. Bridging the generational divide, she brought out Cory Chisel, up and coming artist and a recent Wisconsin transplant, for two songs. Cash finished the show with a performance of her classic, ‘Seven Year Ache’ showing just as much heart as it would have in 1981.
Across town, OffBeat, the legendary New Orleans street magazine showcased some of NOLA’s finest, including Tommy Malone from the subdudes (sic), Susan Cowsill, Jon Cleary and The Dirty Dozen Brass Band. A blend of funk, rock, and New Orleans blues, the performances provided a great counterpoint to Americana’s predominantly white folk-country sounds. Filled with overlaps and collaborations, the show highlighted the tight-knit nature of the NOLA scene. Everyone seemed to know each other too, a group of Louisianans in Tennessee.
Nashville locals Johnny Fritz and Caitlin Rose charmed the crowd during their sets at the intimate Mercy Lounge on Friday night. Fritz’s band in particular, including Josh Hedley on fiddle and Spencer Cullum Jr. on peddle steel, showcased a level of musicianship that was lacking in some of the larger, louder shows downstairs at the Cannery Ballroom.
The Americana purists clashed with the country music mainstream on Saturday morning as registrants lined up for Rodney Crowell’s songwriter session at the Country Music Hall of Fame. Taylor Swift had played a series of shows at the Bridgestone Arena between Thursday and Saturday and the Hall of Fame lobby was packed with pre-teens in cowboy boots. After 30 minutes of confusion, however, we left the crowds behind and filed into the museum’s Ford Theater.
Inside, the stage was bare, with the exception of a guitar, a microphone and a chair. The session needed nothing more. Crowell was engaging, enthusiastic and interacted with the audience with candor and ease. He discussed the origins of songs as requested by the crowd and his descriptions were littered with intimate fragments of personal history. Most enlightening for me, though, were his reflections his creative trajectory as a songwriter, comparing the unrefined inspiration of his twenties with the more concentrated revision process he uses today. Both ways, he noted, have their positives – if only the Crowell of 2013 could have edited the raw material of 1975.
Later on Saturday, the last big day of showcases, Grimey’s – Nashville’s biggest independent record store – hosted ‘Americanarama’ The all-day event brought Nashville locals and Americana registrants together and included performances from Steelism, The Autumn Defense, Amanda Shires and Billy Bragg as well as a huge second hand record sale and Nashville food truck staple ‘Tacos y Mas’.
Billy Bragg’s performance at Grimey’s was one of the most exciting of the week for me. Despite having absorbed his music at an early stage of my own musical development, I had never seen him play. It seemed almost ironic that the first time would be here in Nashville. He was joined by John Stirratt from Wilco (with whom he collaborated on ‘Mermaid Avenue’) and after a few new songs, including the characteristically kitchen-sink ‘Handyman Blues’, launched into a full rendition of his 17 minute first album, Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy.
To my surprise, I was not the only person to know the words to many of the songs. After ripping through all 7 tracks, he commented, “That’s the closest you’ll ever get to seeing me ‘shred’ – it’s like seeing me in my underpants.” I couldn’t help but wonder how much the American audience understood his very British sense of humor.
“In the UK we don’t call it Americana. We call it ‘country music for people who like The Smiths’” Bragg quipped, towards the end of his set. In my mind, and perhaps for a lot of Australians and Brits, this idea really strikes a chord. With participants from many different countries, it isn’t the American-ness that defines this festival, this scene or this music in 2013. It is an evolving genre – a genre that can include new people from new places but that maintains an awareness of roots music history and a commitment to integrity that is too often missing from the mainstream.
As Ketch Secor from Old Crow Medicine Show noted, “What a flourishing Americana music scene really means is that what those pickers did 50 years ago really mattered.”