Ever since its inception in 1995, the burgeoning Americana radio format has faced a number of questions: What is it, exactly, and who belongs in this hard-to-pin-down category? More importantly, can it find a solid niche on the airwaves and in the American mass-market consciousness?

Last year, the nascent Americana Music Association (AMA) convened its first ever conference. Artists, managers, radio programmers and music fans all gathered in Nashville to sort through possible answers to these questions. They came away encouraged and even empowered, but without any solid conclusions—save for the intention to meet again the next year.

In the midst of what has proven to be a banner year for Americana music, the second annual AMA conference was supposed to take place a couple months ago, but the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks forced a postponement. The event finally took place two weeks ago, kicking off Nov. 1 at the Belcourt Theatre, where rising Americana stars Gillian Welch and David Rawlings faced an amused music industry crowd. Guitarist Rawlings’ stage patter only underscored the lingering questions about the Americana format. “They asked us to cut our ‘Elvis Presley Blues’ down for radio play,” he told the crowd, “but I didn’t know where to take it. I guess that would be to you! You’re those Americana people, right? How did that work out?”

The answer to Rawlings’ query isn’t cut-and-dried, for the genre the AMA was created to promote now stands at a crossroads, due in part to its very successes over the past year.

Established by the Gavin radio reporting organization as an alternative format for radio listeners turned off by the often pop-softened sounds of mainstream country radio, Americana married alt-country rock bands, traditional country honky-tonkers, twangin’ (and frequently Texan) singer-songwriters with some edge, and a dollop of modern bluegrass. Gavin dropped the Americana chart a year ago, at which point it was picked up by the Album Network.

With a solid mix built around such core artists as Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Rhonda Vincent, Jay Farrar and The Derailers, the format now reaches a dedicated and often upscale audience through some 50 officially reporting Americana stations across the U.S.; according to the AMA’s own estimates, there are dozens more stations that give substantial time to the format but do not report. Even so, much Americana music is heard not on the air, but onstage. As this year’s keynote speaker Rodney Crowell pointed out, it is at least as much “a musical mind-set” as a music industry categorization.

But the talk and the performances at this year’s AMA event suggested that this mind-set currently appears to be of two minds.

For some promoters and performers, Americana music is a defiant—and defined—potential replacement for mainstream country, and maybe even for mainstream pop. Call this the Big Bang Theory, which views the format as a potential Next Big Thing just waiting for the emergence of a genre megastar or major hit single.

Attention-grabbing even a year ago, this stance is already looking a little long in the tooth, given that mainstream country would seem to be pilfering the Americana arena right now. Case in point: Last week’s CMA Awards show featured a succession of Americana-derived songs. Tim McGraw accepted Entertainer of the Year to the tune of his No. 1 duet with Faith Hill, “Angry All the Time,” written by Americana stalwart Bruce Robison; the Dixie Chicks presented an acoustic version of the same Austin performer/writer’s “Travelin’ Soldier.” Lee Ann Womack tore up the place with her take on Buddy and Julie Miller’s “Does My Ring Burn Your Finger?”—and the royal alt-country couple were right onstage singing backup. The soulful and independent Allison Moorer, prominent at this year’s AMA convention as panelist and performer, comfortably popped up on the CMAs as a presenter.

With Americana’s recent creep into the mainstream country world—heralded most significantly by the phenomenal success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack—many people are arguing that this is in fact what Americana was supposed to do all along. It’s not an alternative, they argue; it’s a movement to bring wider knowledge and acceptance of American roots music. New AMA executive director J.D. May claims that a third of the 95 albums that have debuted on the Billboard country album chart this year (Dolly Parton’s Little Sparrow and Alison Krauss + Union Station’s New Favorite, for instance) are essentially Americana entries.

This approach, stressing career sustainability for creative musicians over mass acceptance, could be called the Steady State Theory. Mainstream chart success for this music may also raise as many questions for the future of the Americana format as it answers. A growing number of artists, promoters, record labels and stations now suggest that Americana isn’t necessarily going to be primarily radio music. Instead, it will continue to find its main home in small- to medium-sized clubs and halls; while capable of serious growth, it isn’t likely to bust out far beyond its specialist niche.

The competition between these two schools of thought sounds like an internal debate, of interest only to industry insiders, but the implications could be significant. Given the relative vagueness of the format’s parameters, however this issue gets settled will likely affect the kind of music that fans and consumers get to hear.

Full of promise

There have been plenty of reasons for Americana fans and backers to be excited about the possibilities of this format. A new 24-hour Americana Music Television network has just started up via satellite TV and cable, while Internet and digital-cable radio networks are poised to reach more listeners than ever. Mike Hays is originator of the “TwangCast” 24-hour Internet Americana station, and he’s also leader of the Virginia-based honky-tonk group Mike Hays & the Bailers, so he has a unique perspective on how the format may grow. “When you can reach an entire nation or even the vast majority of the world as with the ’Net and satellite, a niche format can have huge numbers capable of helping artists sell enough product to sustain careers,” he says. “As an artist, I have had most of my sales success through Internet outlets, and a good portion of my airplay on ’Net stations, and this will most certainly continue.”

There’s little doubt as to whether there’s an audience interested in the music. The O Brother soundtrack sold more than 3 million copies, and it earned two CMA awards last week, despite country radio’s slowness to jump on the trend. The disc introduced hundreds of thousands of listeners to, among others, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, CMA winner Dan Tyminski, and Gillian Welch, whose recent Time (The Revelator) CD has been a career high point and an Americana chart success.

In this context, adventurous bands such as New England’s Tarbox Ramblers and Vancouver’s The Be Good Tanyas—ensembles built around modernized versions of old-timey music—find a friendlier environment for acceptance. Judging by the success of O Brother, this “new-timey” trend could be that elusive next big thing. The appearance of the talented young Louisiana bluesman Chris Thomas King on the movie soundtrack has also cleared the way for the minor success of his own Legend of Tommy Johnson disc. This is a rare case of a blues disc rising on the Americana chart—but it points to a potentially more multiracial definition of Americana, which has intriguing and encouraging implications.

“O Brother already is a Big Bang,” says radio promoter John Grimson of Americana Entertainment. “It certainly has proven that there is a market for this kind of music without any mainstream radio help. This is music with substance over style, and that’s a constant and steady place to be; it will be around a long time.”

But there’s a problem here: Steady is not what some Americana promoters are looking for. What they want are bona fide stars in their format—of which there appear to be a few in the making. It remains to be seen just how widely they’ll break out, but the signs are promising.

North Carolina-based Tift Merritt, a much discussed twang and torch singer-songwriter, has thus far generated more media buzz than recordings, but her first album is said to be due next year. She’s certainly some observers’ nominee for Americana superstar—a sort of next-gen Emmylou Harris who rocks harder. She’s got songs, a voice, instrumental chops and looks. Her Lost Highway labelmate Ryan Adams, former head of the much admired but volatile Whiskeytown, is certainly another candidate for alt-country celebrity. His Gold CD is a rising mass-market hit that sold more than 40,000 copies in its first weeks of release in England. Adams has been featured in Entertainment Weekly, in New York Times Magazine and on Saturday Night Live—well beyond the alt-country niche.

To many in the record business, the potential for crossover success appears to be huge, and Adams’ label is keen on the idea. Lost Highway A&R chief Frank Callari has told the rock press that Adams is “learning not to be scared of anything that might sound a little more pop.” Those may sound like ominous words for listeners who turned to alt-country because they saw it as, well, an alternative. Based on Callari’s view, Americana could end up replicating what, for many, it was designed to avoid. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Stylistically, Adams’ Gold maintains only the thinnest connections to rebellious alt-country, let alone the country genre (in which it has occasionally been slotted by record retailers). It’s a sure sign that labels’ search for that next big thing could very well dull the music’s edge. In another troubling signal, some of the acts who showcased at this year’s AMA convention—the charming but utterly pop-oriented Garrison Starr, for one—sounded barely connected to Americana music at all. They were basically rock performers who happened to be on labels that otherwise boasted a roster of Americana acts.

Where to now?

Fortunately, “blanding down” Americana’s edge is not the only way for it to grow. Opening the format—as many stations, labels and performers clearly want to do—could actually lessen the continuing difficulty of explaining what “Americana” means. Rather than thinking of the music as some sort of “revenge on the country chart,” we might start regarding it as a gumbo of forms as broad as those represented on PBS’ American Roots Music series: blues, gospel, folk, country and bluegrass, along with Latin and Cajun and other ethnic sounds.

The clash of views over Americana’s future is recognized by AMA board executives, but it’s not considered a damaging problem in and of itself. “Our mission is to raise the level of the water for all boats,” says incoming president Grant Alden, co-publisher and editor of the alt-country bible No Depression. “If someone only likes some of the boats—well, OK! The organization is about sustaining careers and kinds of music, and that’s now a collective cultural challenge.”

There’s no reason, in other words, why the Americana format can’t continue to grow both in style and success. It can be a sustainable hotbed of creativity while occasionally feeding the mainstream charts a new hit, whether by Alison Krauss or Ryan Adams or some new up-and-comer. It can give good, frequently adventurous music a better chance to be heard.

At this year’s AMA conference, veteran performer Delbert McClinton was asked in a panel discussion where fans have usually found his records—in the country, rock or R&B bin? “In the cut-out bin!” he replied instantly. But the Americana format, he noted, has finally freed him to “color outside the lines.” Instead of landing in the bargain bin, Nothing Personal, his latest disc on New West, sat at the top of the Americana charts for 12 weeks, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

Already in the brief history of the Americana format, there have been some notable successes, but there have also been some potential dangers. Thus the format’s willingness to evolve might be the most important development yet. It’s not clear yet just how that evolution will occur, but there seems to be little doubt that it must take place. The AMA’s slogan of a year ago, “We walk the line,” looks to be morphing, unofficially, toward a less defiant but more sustainable motto: “We cross the lines.”