Kyshona, S.G. Goodman and More Elevate Americana

It was Saturday night church, Americana style, at Inglewood performance and event space Riverside Revival. As the name suggests, the relatively new space does indeed sit inside a historic Nashville church. I took my place in the elegantly appointed room, and I heard four female-led bands that made their various cases for Americana as a humanistic form of what you might call roots-pop. The unifying thread of the show was the way songwriting and performance style work together: You could hear strains of gospel-folk, Laurel Canyon-style country-rock and post-punk, and you could also detect some old-time country in the mix.

Amanda Rheaume
Photo: Britton Strickland

The CSNY-meets-Joni Mitchell side of Americana got representation from Canadian singer-songwriter Amanda Rheaume. Her band, which featured fiddle and guitar along with a solid rhythm section, played folk-pop-country, and they had a great flow. Rheaume performed songs from her new album The Spaces in Between, which is a classic singer-songwriter record focusing on the history of Canada’s Indigenous Métis people. Ishkōdé Records, a label Rheaume co-founded, held the first AmericanaFest showcase of all Indigenous artists on Thursday. When Rheaume sang “Supposed to Be” and “All Sides of Me,” she sounded like a pop artist figuring out a way to reconcile reality with idealism.

In contrast, S.G. Goodman began her set with “Work Until I Die,” a one-chord tune that’s on her latest album Teeth Marks. It featured a sprung, skewed drum pattern, a repetitive bass line and skronky guitars. It swung like post-punk, and the rest of her set showed off her ability to write indelible riffs that make her songs — Teeth Marks is the Tennessee-born and Kentucky-residing songsmith’s breakthrough album — even more appealing. Goodman sings like a punk-influenced musician who also grew up singing in church, and the contrast makes for bracing music.

Goodman’s songwriting has affinities to, say, folk, and maybe even the Drive-By Truckers’ tales of getting lost in the South, but her music aspires to the denseness of punk. There isn’t any punk in the folk-blues work of Nashville’s own Kyshona, who plays funky acoustic guitar and writes songs that have a tinge of jazz-folk — some The Hissing of Summer Lawns — in them. With fellow vocalists Maureen Murphy and Nickie Conley helping out, she sang recent songs like “Out Loud,” a co-write with Caroline Spence released earlier this year that’s about claiming the space you deserve. Across her catalog, Kyshona directs her skill as a singer and songwriter and her presence onstage toward compassion, keeping it at the center.

Closing out the night was Kentucky-born songsmith Kelsey Waldon, who has proven herself an advanced country singer, songwriter and bandleader. Her band was sharp and understated, and they navigated her songs with ease. Waldon’s songs — check out her fine new album No Regular Dog — take cues from ’70s country. But she also played a couple of country waltzes that sounded like the hard stuff, with no intervening layers of Americana to soften the edges. Her traditionalism felt like innovation, and that’s one possible definition for Americana.