After the COVID-19 pandemic forced the Americana Music Association to cancel its annual Honors and Awards gala at the Ryman in 2020 and move it to social media, the event made its in-person return on Wednesday. Overall, this year’s slate of winners showcased a better balance than in 2020, when The Highwomen won three of the six awards voted on by the association’s membership. One of the few bummers was that Allison Russell (read our interview with her), her fellow phenomenal songwriter and bandleader Amythyst Kiah and the supergroup they’re part of, Our Native Daughters, all went home without a trophy. You can almost bet that Russell’s Outside Child and Kiah’s Wary + Strange — both released this year after the eligibility window closed — will be among the 2022 Album of the Year nominees.
This time, though, Album of the Year went to Sturgill Simpson’s Cuttin’ Grass, Vol. 1: The Butcher Shoppe Sessions. The record is the first of a two-volume set co-produced by Simpson and longtime collaborator David R. Ferguson, featuring renditions of the top-notch singer-songwriter’s tunes that home in on the mountain music that’s a core influence on many of them. This volume was made at The Butcher Shoppe, the now-defunct Germantown studio and office that Ferguson shared with the late John Prine.
In 2020, following his death from complications of COVID-19, Prine won the association’s Artist of the Year award for the fourth time. He received another posthumous award Wednesday: Song of the Year for the poignant “I Remember Everything,” his Grammy-winning final co-write with fellow great Pat McLaughlin.
Brandi Carlile
For the second time in her career, the excellent Brandi Carlile was recognized as Artist of the Year. Carlile is far from the only talented or thoughtful individual working in the field of music. But if the point of writing and singing songs, producing other people’s records and performing in public is to process and convey emotional experience and understanding, it’s hard to find anyone doing it better or with more empathy. Similarly, the field of Instrumentalist of the Year nominees was packed with superb players. This time, the award went to Kristin Weber, an MVP of strings who’s played with everyone from Dolly Parton to Lorde to beloved Nashville ’90s tribute act My So-Called Band, and has without a doubt earned it.
As noted by contributor Geoffrey Himes in his conversation with Americana Music Association executive director Jed Hilly, Nashville musicians tend to have a geographical advantage when it comes to voting. The winners of the other membership-voted categories at the 2021 awards buck the trend. Black Pumas, the Grammy-nominated Austin, Texas, psych-pop-soul group who took home the Americana Music Association’s Emerging Artist of the Year award in 2020, were recognized this time as Duo/Group of the Year. Their fellow Texan Charley Crockett won Emerging Artist of the Year. Crockett, born in 1984, has a heap of stories to tell: He spent his early years in the rural Rio Grande Valley near the border with Mexico, was tempted by the allure of crime as a teenager in Dallas, and struck out on his own, sometimes living on the street, to get away from it. He began his music career in earnest in his early 30s and has been releasing lively, perceptive records — blending a wide range of traditions from Western swing to New Orleans R&B and beyond — at an astonishing rate, including two full albums in 2020 and two more (so far) in 2021.
This year’s lifetime achievement honorees include The Fisk Jubilee Singers. The widely revered vocal group, which celebrates its 150th anniversary in October, represents one of Nashville’s oldest and richest ties to our Black cultural heritage. The group was recognized with the Legacy of Americana Award, a co-presentation with the National Museum of African American Music that was first presented to Rhiannon Giddens and in honor of the late Frank Johnson in 2019. The Inspiration Award went to Memphis soul legend Carla Thomas, while phenomenal engineer Trina Shoemaker took home the Producer/Engineer Award. Latin American country-rock-and-pop group The Mavericks received the Trailblazer Award, while the Performance Award went to their fellow Nashvillian, blues stalwart Keb’ Mo’.
