Americana's Big Tent Gets Bigger
From a packed Golden Gate Park to Glasgow, Galway and Canada's back roads, the week showed a roots-music culture stretching confidently across generations, borders and definitions.
Americana spent the past week behaving less like a genre than a loose international federation. In San Francisco, one of its largest gatherings became so crowded that organizers temporarily closed every entrance to Golden Gate Park. In Glasgow, an Americana festival celebrated its twentieth year. In Galway, musicians pushed traditional Irish folk toward psychedelia and motorik rhythms. Across Canada, a Yukon songwriter began a six-week journey that treats touring almost as an extension of folk tradition itself.
The most visible gathering was Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, held October 2 through 4 in San Francisco. The free festival assembled a remarkable cross-section of American roots music: Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Molly Tuttle, Buddy Miller, Los Lobos, Mavis Staples, Old Crow Medicine Show, Punch Brothers, Marty Stuart, Sierra Hull and many others. Saturday's crowds became large enough for organizers to close all festival gates for roughly an hour, apparently the first complete access shutdown in the event's history.
Robert Plant supplied one of the weekend's unexpected threads. Before his scheduled Sunday performance with Saving Grace and Suzi Dian, he appeared Saturday during Buddy Miller's set for an impromptu five-song performance. His Sunday show drew from folk, gospel, blues and reworked Led Zeppelin material, including a dedication to Dolly Parton, whose death continued to reverberate throughout the festival. Around fifteen artists reportedly incorporated songs written or recorded by Parton into their performances.
That combination of reverence and restlessness was equally visible across the Atlantic. Glasgow Americana Festival marked its twentieth edition with more than 50 musicians performing across venues including Saint Luke's, Cottiers, The Glad Cafe and The Rum Shack. James McMurtry opened the festival, while Dar Williams, The Delines, Annie Keating, The Dreaming Spires and Darden Smith helped make the program a genuinely transatlantic affair. Its longevity says something about how firmly Americana has established itself within Britain's independent live-music culture.
Britain's charts offered another measure of that expansion. Noah Kahan retained No. 1 on the Official Americana Albums Chart, while Swiss-Ecuadorian brothers Hermanos Gutiérrez debuted at No. 5 with Los Ojos del Cóndor. Dylan Gossett's Ramblin' entered at No. 10, Morgan Freeman's Symphonic Blues project arrived at No. 17, and Mary Gauthier's Reckoning debuted at No. 22. The chart now encompasses traditional singer-songwriters, cinematic guitar music, orchestral blues and artists whose relationship with country music has become increasingly difficult to contain within older categories.
Ireland supplied perhaps the week's most adventurous roots record. Galway collective Trá Pháidín released Cloch's Claí, a second album that uses Irish-language folk as a platform for improvisation, psychedelic texture, mariachi flourishes and motorik rhythm. Traditional instrumentation remains audible throughout, while the group also turns its attention toward housing, tourism, language and modern Irish identity. The result suggests a folk tradition sufficiently secure in itself to tolerate irreverence.
That same confidence appeared in Britain through Lady Nade's new single "Identity." The Bristol singer-songwriter used the song and accompanying video to explore ancestry, race, scars, belonging and self-definition. Directed by Polish filmmaker Aggy Rucin, the visual component also reflects Nade's Polish heritage, widening the cultural vocabulary surrounding British Americana and roots music.
Jake Bugg, meanwhile, continued moving toward the folk-oriented sound that first brought him international attention. His forthcoming album Alamo, due November 13 through Thirty Tigers, was accompanied this week by the announcement of 20 intimate British record-store performances. Produced by Jimmy Hogarth and Steve McEwan, the album has been presented as a return to Bugg's folk-leaning songwriting, now filtered through the perspective of an artist in his early thirties rather than the teenage prodigy who emerged from Nottingham more than a decade ago.
Canada offered a quieter version of the same roots infrastructure. Yukon songwriter Kim Beggs began an extensive national tour supporting her seventh album, Beneath Your Skin. Recorded in Montreal with producer Howard Bilerman, the album draws heavily on family history, survival and the natural world. Beggs' itinerary runs from British Columbia through Ontario and the Maritimes, including folk clubs, house concerts and a Folk Canada Conference appearance, the sort of circuit through which much of North American roots music still survives.
Elsewhere in Canadian roots music, Rosina Cove returned with "Kenwood," while Lo and the High Road released "Salem," a song drawing on the recorded words of women who died during the Salem witch trials. The latter fits a long folk tradition in which historical documents become songwriting material, carrying voices from the archive into contemporary performance.
The week's developments collectively made a persuasive case for Americana's continued elasticity. Acoustic instruments and inherited song forms remain at its center, while the surrounding culture now comfortably includes Irish-language experimentation, Swiss-Ecuadorian desert guitar, Canadian northern songwriting, British identity music, orchestral blues and Robert Plant wandering onto a San Francisco stage beside Buddy Miller.
The old antenna still works. It is simply receiving signals from considerably farther away.