Among the 2010 Americana Music Festival showcases, many variations on a theme
by Jewly Hight
As the philosophy of Americana the genre goes — part keeping tradition and part reimagining it — so go the Americana Festival showcases. Some things have become — or are quickly becoming — pretty reliable traditions. For example, there will be a secret show featuring somebody who'd ordinarily play much bigger rooms than Mercy Lounge. (Look for it to be an analog-era roots star, like John Fogerty last year.) Mike Farris will tear the roof off with gospel-y fervor. There will be a tribute to music or a music-maker that helped sketch out the Americana template in the '60s or '70s. (One year it was Gram Parsons; this year it's an album — the Stones' Exile on Main Street.)
Elsewhere in the showcase goings-on there are variations on themes. Jon Langford, Exene Cervenka and Peter Case — all veteran singers and songwriters of rootsy stripes who have punk in their backgrounds (Langford with the Mekons, Cervenka with X and Case with the Plimsouls) — are performing and taking part in a panel on their and their audiences' relationships to both kinds of music.
Not only is still-kicking rockabilly (and country and gospel) spitfire Wanda Jackson getting a lifetime achievement award and giving a live interview, she's also got a whole night of rockabilly built around her, featuring Dale Watson and the Dex Romweber Duo.
The indie strains of Americana — or the Americana strains of indie music, depending on how you look at it — will be well represented. (It seems like half of the indie acts out there have a rustic, rootsy thing going that wouldn't be so out of place at the festival.) There's Rayland Baxter, tuneful and courtly singer-songwriter, and Frontier Ruckus, a quartet that sound like Bright Eyes' distant cousins.
Among the more familiar faces are three who can be counted to put on their version of a swinging show with vintage sensibilities: Chuck Mead and his energetic hillbilly boogies, Paul Burch and his stylish early country and pop, and Raul Malo, whose new album Sinners & Saints has the deepest Latin flavor of anything he's done in a while. Another standout voice to match Malo's is Shelby Lynne's, being put to use of late on rather stripped-down stuff.
And since Americana's one of the last scenes in which the album-length artistic statement is valued over the crisp and glossy downloadable single/ringtone, singer-songwriters who've told heavy-duty stories across entire albums this year — like Mary Gauthier with The Foundling and Paul Thorn with Pimps and Preachers — are there for the hearing, too.
