Americana Honors and Awards Spotlight Carlile, Prine, The War and Treaty, More

After Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit took home three of the six trophies in voter-determined categories at the 2018 Americana Honors and Awards, Isbell tweeted about both his gratitude and his concern: “I also wish the list of winners was at least as diverse as the list of nominees.”

The Americana Music Association was launched two decades ago in part to raise the profiles of artists who don’t get the spotlight by default. While Isbell & Co. do superb work, it seemed odd that they took half the field while Margo Price and other multiple-award nominees left empty-handed. The nominations for the 2019 Honors and Awards felt like a good-faith attempt to balance things out, with women strongly represented in five of the six categories and people of color in four. This year’s slate of winners, recognized Sept. 11 during the annual concert at the Ryman, also reflects that effort.

Like Price, Brandi Carlile received three nominations for Americana awards in 2018 but didn’t win one. This time, Carlile was rightfully honored as Artist of the Year. In addition to being one of the finest songwriters and performers of this century, Carlile firmly and frequently speaks out on behalf of human decency, and that’s been widely recognized over the past 18 months. You can hear it in her songs — her Grammy-winning album By the Way, I Forgive You is a good place to start. You can also hear it in her advocacy for equal treatment of women in the music industry, which comes in part through her phenomenal new country group The Highwomen (also featuring Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris and Amanda Shires). On top of that, Carlile has launched a new music festival called Girls Just Wanna Weekend, and she co-wrote and co-produced While I’m Livin’, country legend Tanya Tucker’s first album since 2002. 

If Carlile is newly being recognized as the kind of icon the country and Americana worlds need, John Prine has continued in that role for nearly five decades. Prine won Album of the Year for his Dave Cobb-produced LP The Tree of Forgiveness, his first collection of new original songs since 2005. Prine and co-writer Pat McLaughlin also won Song of the Year for the Tree cut “Summer’s End.” The song’s exploration of grief is, characteristically, incredibly rich and deceptively simple.

Tanya and Michael Trotter, the married couple better known as the soul-blues-country-and-more duo The War and Treaty, were crowned Emerging Act of the Year. Their debut LP Healing Tide has a great deal to say about finding the confidence to reach out to others — romantic partners as well as strangers. Sarah Jarosz, Sara Watkins and Aoife O’Donovan, string-band aces who came together as the trio I’m With Her, took home Group of the Year honors, while bluegrass guitarist Chris Eldridge (of Punch Brothers and others) was awarded Instrumentalist of the Year. 

And as announced before the show, figures who’ve shaped the ever-elastic, big-tent genre of Americana were also recognized. Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, the late husband-and-wife writing team behind such classics as “Rocky Top” and “Bye Bye Love,” were given the President’s Award, while two living greats, Elvis Costello and Delbert McClinton, were honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards for Songwriting and Performance, respectively. Maria Muldaur might be best known for her 1974 pop hit “Midnight at the Oasis,” but her decades of exploration in folk, jazz and other traditions earned her the Trailblazer Award. Mavis Staples’ incredible voice and incredible compassion have been a guiding light for fans and fellow musicians for more than 60 years, and she received the inaugural Inspiration Award. And string-band and cultural scholar Rhiannon Giddens accepted the inaugural Legacy of Americana Award, which also recognized 18th-century black string-band musician and composer Frank Johnson — see contributor Brittney McKenna’s interview with Giddens (“Legacy Support,” in the Sept. 5, 2019, issue of the Scene) for more on that.