High Definition

With the Americana Music Association’s 17th annual AmericanaFest hitting venues across town this week, it’s time once again to ask, “Just what the hell do we mean by Americana?”

The question sounds flippant, but there’s actually a serious issue wrapped inside the wisecrack. Sure, most artists hate category labels; they’re scared of excluding any possible customer. But for those of us who like to write and talk about music, well-defined category labels are indispensable.

We want to be able to talk about the similarities that bind various artists together, and each time we refer to such a cluster of musicians, it's a whole lot easier to use a shorthand phrase like “Americana” than to say, “a contemporary music that incorporates elements of various American roots music styles, including country, roots-rock, folk, bluegrass, R&B and blues, resulting in a distinctive roots-oriented sound that lives in a world apart from the pure forms of the genres upon which it may draw.”

The above mouthful of a definition comes from the AMA itself. It’s just the group's latest stab at answering this vexing question. In 2003, the organization said, “Americana is American roots music based on the traditions of country. … The musical model can be traced back to the Elvis Presley marriage of hillbilly and R&B.”

In 2007, it offered, “Americana is music that honors and is derived from the traditions of American roots music. It is music inspired by American culture traditions which is not only represented in classic man-made/roots-based sounds but also through new and contemporary artists.” Jed Hilly, the AMA’s executive director, recently sent an email that added, “My definition is more simple: If you can taste the dirt through your ears, that’s Americana.”

You can see the problem. Definitions often devolve into laundry lists of other ill-defined genres or into poetic phrases, neither of which make clear what’s included and what’s excluded. This is not a criticism of the AMA's good-faith efforts; it’s a recognition of the challenges involved.

One such challenge is distinguishing a kind of music from the quality of the music. There’s a temptation to say, “Our music, which we call hip-hop, is great art, and that commercial rap over there is crap.” Substitute “Americana” or “indie rock” for “hip-hop” in that sentence and “commercial country” or “commercial rock” for “commercial rap,” and you get the same dynamic. That’s not a definition of a genre; it’s a judgment on what kind of music you like.

Every genre (even your favorite) produces great music and lousy music, so you can’t define a musical category by how good it is. Any valid definition of Americana music has to include both great bands like the Bottle Rockets and lousy bands like Shovels & Rope. It has to exclude both great bands like OutKast and lousy bands like Bon Jovi. A genre should be based on a lineage of sound that can be handled deftly or handled clumsily and still be recognized as the same sound.

Complicating the challenge for Americana is its ambition to be a super-genre, an umbrella that gathers a number of subgenres under its cover, as implied by the first definition above. That’s a valid mission, but to make it work, you have to identify the common elements that bind everything together; simply listing them is not enough. You have to explain why both Del McCoury and Bobby Rush are Americana acts, even though McCoury is not a blues ’n’ soul act and Rush is not a bluegrass act.

Further complicating the challenge is the issue that troubles almost every aspect of American life: race. Americana originally emerged as the most palatable term for the subgenre previously known as alt-country, country-rock and cow-punk. This scene, however, was overwhelmingly European-American, which created both political and musical problems.

Political, because most of the artists involved are loath to reinforce racial divisions and isolation. Musical, because country music is every bit as rooted in African music as the blues is rooted in European music. Bill Monroe absorbed much of his sound from black fiddler Arnold Schultz, while Chuck Berry forged his distinctive sound by transforming Bob Wills’ “Ida Red” into “Maybellene.” Earl Scruggs played a Malian instrument, the banjo; Robert Johnson played a Spanish instrument, the guitar, and Clifton Chenier played a German instrument, the accordion. Even if you could disentangle these influences, would you really want to?

To its credit, the AMA has worked hard to make African-American music part of its annual festival (this year it honors soul singer William Bell and incorporates the McCrary Sisters into the awards show house band). But it has had more luck in attracting black artists than in attracting black audiences. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which are the pained memories that prompt many African-Americans to avoid cultural reminders from the rural South before the civil rights era. There’s more work to be done in this area, and it should be reflected in any definition of Americana.

Allow me to offer my own definition: “Americana music is any music clearly based on the way working-class musicians from the Greater American South between 1925 and 1965 handled the traditions imported from the British Isles, West Africa, northern France and northern Mexico.” By the Greater South, I mean the Confederate States plus such crucial border states as Oklahoma (home of Woody Guthrie), Missouri (Chuck Berry) and Kentucky (Bill Monroe). I chose 1925, because that's when recordings and radio began to codify regional styles, and 1965, because that's when TV began to homogenize those regional styles beyond distinction.

The advantage of this definition is that it relies on geography, class and time rather than the names of other poorly defined genres. It implies a set of instruments that, acoustic or amplified, still distinguish Americana music. It acknowledges the complex weave of Anglo-Celtic and West African influences and yet allows a person of any ethnicity, nationality or generation to join the genre if they draw on the same body of inspiration (explaining how England’s Richard Thompson and Australia’s Paul Kelly have been showcased at past AmericanaFests).

This definition allows an artist to release a non-Americana album at one point in a career (such as Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, for example) and an Americana album (such as Nebraska) at another point in the same career. It allows hillbilly-sounding Americana acts and ’80s-rock-sounding non-Americana acts to coexist on country radio. It distinguishes this Southern working-class music from the East Coast's middle-class art music of the same time period: operettas, vaudeville, musicals, ragtime, klezmer, big-band swing, bebop, cool jazz and the American Songbook.

And it works as a distinction of kind, not of quality. No one should deny the brilliance of Duke Ellington, George Gershwin or Kendrick Lamar just because they’re not Americana acts. And just because you draw on the working-class music of the mid-20th-century South doesn’t mean you’re interpreting it particularly well or badly. It just means we know what to call what you’re doing: Americana.

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