A unique but incomplete American tale

Americanaland: Where Country & Western Met Rock ‘n’ Roll

By John Milward

University of Illinois Press, 2021

Genre is a slippery slope. As much as we like to believe it captures a musical essence it’s a commercial convenience we usually experience personally. When we respond to music we’re often responding to the people making it and listening to it, or more simply the cultures associated with the music. Separating music from culture is futile given our highly subjective nature as humans. Sometimes when we embrace or resist something we’re establishing a boundary between where we fit and place we’d prefer to avoid. The alleged “Americana” genre, sandwiched precariously between country, rock, and folk music is a really complex place to dwell for many listeners.

At the risk of sounding flippant when I think of the Americana music I tend to think of middle class and/or affluent white musicians seeking “poignance” by either trying sound like older black blues performers, and the implied wit, wisdom, and dues paying, and/or to emulate the vocal grit and struggle associated with the white underclass. Though this is a gross generalization its hard not hear that when I hear Bob Dylan performing in his “blues” voice (truthfully, he has many voices) or Gram Parsons striving for country authenticity.  The racial and class aspirations inherent to the genre has always troubled me.

Journalist John Milward’s engaging new book Americanaland: Where Country & Western Met Rock ‘n’ Roll has not alleviated me of this concern. Rather than organizing his book primarily around direct interviews with musicians as Peter Guralnick did in such classics as Feels Like Home, Lost Highway, and Sweet Soul Music or focusing narrowly as Pete Doggett does regarding country rock’s history in Are You ready for the Country? he tackles something far more difficult to define.

As thorough as it is the author has chosen has an epic, mythical narrative tone that frequently elides some thornier issues. Buried within the respective invocation of cross-cultural, multi-generational genre “hybridity” and “fusion” is a denial of Americana’s commercial relationship to country music and that genre’s insular racial politics. While Milward notes the blues and gospel influences on the art of several artists, such as Hank Williams, profiles Ray Charles, and mentions the modern string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops and the career of their solo vocalist Rhiannon Giddens, the vexed politics of authenticity haunts the book.

Americana remains a strangely ambiguous “you-know-it-when-you-hear-it” type of genre. If it’s a genre at all. The Americana Music Association and the Grammys, which have Americana categories, seem to think so but it might more accurately understood as a sensibility. Milward’s survey is an expansive one that includes Buck Owens, Lyle Lovett, and Julie Miller, but never congeals into a discernible whole.  The figures Milward associates with the genre in his history, which spans from the Carter Family to the Jason Isbell are students of gospel, folk, country, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll, who freely fuse strains of these ingredients when necessary. This mix has garnered immense acclaim for Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, John Prine, and Emmylou Harris, to name a few of Americana’s acolytes.

As detailed in his selective, roughly chronological timeline American musical genres that seem obvious today have gained legibility at different moments of convergence. For example, The Byrds’ 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo is regarded as a country-rock masterpiece in part because it was unusual for non-Southern members of the counterculture to express interest and admiration for country music which was seen as a symbol of white, Southern conservatism. Listened to today it just sounds like a (well executed) mainstream country album of its era but it was a radical intervention at the time. Similarly, the migration of formerly mainstream country artists like Emmylou Harris and Rosanne Cash toward folk-pop/rock fusion and the birth of “alt country” paved the way for gifted singer-songwriters like Lucinda Williams to gain firmer commercial footing than was possible when new traditionalists and “hat acts” defined country radio in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Milward’s book is a highly readable account of how the genre has taken shape with vivid pit stops all over the nation from Hank Williams’s origins in Alabama to Elvis Presley’s Sun Records sessions in Memphis to Emmylou Harris’s fortuitous harmonizing with Gram Parsons in California. Fusion seems integral to the entire enterprise: There are musicians who engage across age and generation; Canadians, including Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Robbie Robertson, alongside Americans; men and women; acts associated with country, rock, R&B, and gospel alongside “Americana,” and a sprinkling of geographic diversity. The unique embroidered portraits of select artists by Margi Greeve also add a lovely visual flair to complement the prose. As a writer Milward’s writing is elegant and efficient, and has an almost invisible momentum that propels you seamlessly from page to page. In Milward’s tale commercial genres like “folk” are more limited in how we understand them than the catholic influences of the artists themselves. This informs my view of Americana as something one perceives rather than something finite or discernible musically.

Such mythical ambiguity also speaks to some of the limitations of the genre or at least Milward’s construction which exists on a border between romance and reality. Though he readily acknowledges the influence of African-American musical styles, or specific figures, on the songs The Carter Family copyrighted, on Hank William’s musical development, and the vocal style of The Band’s Levon Helm, he dodges Americana’s complex racial politics.

As noted Milward profiles Ray Charles’s career for the pervasiveness role of country music to his Southern background and the impact of his classic album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Few authors have noted how influential so-called white “hillbilly” music was to generations of black artists born in the 1930s-1940s. The fact that so many black singers (e.g., Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, Joe Simon, Al Green, Aaron Neville) have interpreted and/or contributed to country music before its commercial boundaries hardened is a missing thread. It’s peculiar to me that Americana makes room for Linda Ronstadt and Dwight Yoakam, who I associate chiefly with pop and honky-tonk, but there’s no mention of black pedal steel guitarist Robert Randolph and the Family Band. How wide is the umbrella? Who counts and who doesn’t?

Despite references to black artists race itself is strangely absent. The author rarely acknowledges Americana as a predominantly white genre. While artists’ casual references to “stealing” or “borrowing” licks from blues and gospel influences (e.g., Bob Dylan, The Band) are noted the fact that few blues artists have ever approached the financial rewards of publicity many of the book’s most notable figures have garnered is not addressed. At heart is the fact that the industries that support country, folk, and Americana have rarely offered been inviting spaces for non-white artists. The exceptionalism of Ray Charles, Giddens, Charley Pride, and, more recently, the country success of Darius Rucker and Britain’s Yola Carter is the problem. Why are black artists rarely prominent in the Americana a and its close cousin country? Since Milward largely relies on secondary sources I wish he cited some of the essays in editor Diane Pecknold’s excellent collection on African-Americans in country music Hidden in the Mix to fill in these gaps.

 A more robust political analysis of the contemporary country industry and audience’s politics would also add some depth to the book. Milward addresses the tensions between hippy sensibilities and white conservatives in the 1960s, and discusses the political responses to Steve Earle’s “John Walker Blues” and The Chick’s anti-Iraq War stance. What’s missing is a meditation of the tension between the old and new South in country music and the odd mismatch of its musical openness and to cultural insularity.  The way some country artists have rejected black performers at country music awards shows, country radio’s willing embrace of white “bro-country” with rap and rejection of Lil Nas X’s s 2019 country-trap hybrid “Old Town Road,” the hateful social media back female country artists Mickey Guyton has received, and the divergent industry/consumer response to Morgan Wallen’s filmed racist rant exemplifies this tension.

One may notice I keep citing the country music industry rather than Americana and that is not coincidental. Americana remains a second cousin to country despite its hybridized nature. Aside from a few specialty stations online magazines like No Depression, and the Americana/Folk Albums chart in trade magazines Americana has a thin industry structure. Most acts defined as Americana began in mainstream country and/or are chiefly associated with country, and can often reap the benefits of occasional access to what is a more clearly defined genre. As such it still feels more like a form of cachet coveted by critics and a select audience; a kind of hipster marking than a distinctive musical identity.

This element informs its odd racial politics. Lucinda Williams, who has a country Grammy for writing “Passionate Kisses” and folk and rock Grammys, dwells in the country and rock worlds commercially, and has the cachet of being “Americana.” Artists like Rucker, Guyton, or even Lil Nas X don’t seem to have the same commercial and creative freedom. I’m encouraged by the progressive politics of The Chicks and The Drive-By Truckers and the author’s attention to some of the ways it has matured but the issue transcends individual behavior and reflects the more enduring problem of racial segregation that no amount of cross-cultural stylistic curiosity has been able to overcome. 

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