Today on Route 66

I can’t write in Bill Bryson’s exact style, but I can use a similar high-level approach: conversational travel writing, dry humor, vivid observation and gently skeptical cultural commentary. The Music That Refuses to Stay Put The most persistent misunderstanding about roots music is that it belongs somewhere. People place it in the American South, preferably in a town with a courthouse, a water tower and a barbecue restaurant that has been open since 1957. They locate it in Nashville, Mississippi, Appalachia, Bakersfield or some other landscape where the roads are long and the buildings appear to have survived several economic downturns through stubbornness alone. But music has never respected borders very much. It crosses them in battered cars, on touring buses, through family stories, scratched records, radio signals and songs carried in the memory of people who may not even agree on where the song began. This week, the music traveled widely. It moved from Mississippi to Britain, from Canada to Australia, from County Down to Nunavut, and from a small Illinois museum to a vanished Las Vegas stage. It also entered the courtroom, where musicians and copyright organizations are trying to determine whether a machine can imitate a human voice without first taking something from the humans who made such voices meaningful. The week began with the death of Cassandra Wilson, who died at 70 at her home in Jackson, Mississippi. Wilson was usually filed under jazz, which was accurate in the same way that calling the Mississippi River a waterway is accurate. Her music reached into blues, country, folk, rhythm and blues and the quiet, acoustic traditions of the American South. On records such as Blue Light til Dawn and New Moon Daughter, she made the boundaries between genres seem less like walls than lines drawn in pencil. Her voice could sound ancient and entirely modern within the same phrase. She did not need to announce that she was expanding the possibilities of roots-informed singing. She simply sang as if the possibilities had always been there. Elsewhere, the future of music was being argued in less melodic surroundings. Jason Isbell, David Lowery, blues musician Guy Forsyth and Eduardo Calle filed a proposed class action against Suno, alleging that the artificial intelligence company used musicians’ identities without authorization to facilitate stylistic imitation. In Canada, SOCAN filed a separate copyright case involving 150 allegedly infringing Suno outputs. The legal arguments are still developing, but the central uneasiness is already familiar. A machine can now produce something that resembles a musician, a genre or an era. What it cannot easily reproduce is the long accumulation of accidents, disappointments, influences, bad equipment, family history and unpaid bills that gives a song its human weight. A computer may know what a blues song sounds like. It has not yet spent a humid afternoon in Mississippi discovering that the air itself appears to have a personal grievance. The Americana Honors and Awards will take place at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on September 16, and the announced lineup resembles a family reunion in which everyone has brought a different instrument and at least one unresolved argument. Robert Plant, Brandi Carlile, Margo Price, I’m With Her, Molly Tuttle, Kathleen Edwards, Ken Pomeroy and S.G. Goodman are among those scheduled to perform. There will also be a tribute to Dolly Parton, with Buddy Miller directing the house band. The pairing of veteran figures and newer artists suggests a tradition that is less interested in preserving a fixed sound than in keeping the conversation active. The music remains recognizable because it keeps changing. This was also evident on Britain’s Official Americana Albums Chart, where Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide rose from third place to number one. Brandon Flowers’ Thrasher moved aside, while Alabama Shakes debuted at number five with I Must Be Dreaming. Billy Strings entered at number ten with So Much for Goodbyes, and The Jayhawks arrived at number twelve. The chart is an odd little map of musical geography. An American genre, defined rather loosely, is being measured in Britain, where its audience is apparently happy to accommodate Vermont introspection, Alabama rock, bluegrass virtuosity and Minnesota jangle in the same neighborhood. There was movement in the opposite direction as well. The Canadian Country Music Association launched a pilot exchange between Canada and Australia, pairing Canadian artist Jade Eagleson with Australian artist Tyla Rodrigues. Rodrigues will perform in Canada, take part in writing sessions and attend industry meetings before appearing at Country Music Week in Saskatoon. Eagleson is expected to undertake a corresponding Australian program in early 2027. This is how musical cultures remain alive. Not through solemn declarations about heritage, but through people getting on airplanes, entering unfamiliar rooms and discovering that the person in front of them has been worrying about many of the same things. In Geelong, Australia, the folk festival returned to Geelong West Town Hall after disappearing for several decades. The revived event presented folk, acoustic, blues and roots performers, along with workshops and informal sessions. The most encouraging detail was that the local folk club had continued operating during the festival’s long absence. This is how traditions often survive. Not as grand institutions with marble entrances, but as a handful of determined people who continue meeting in rooms that need better heating. Australia’s Groundwater Country Music Festival announced Country Calling, a songwriter round featuring Nathan Lamont, Georgia Corowa and Joey Leigh Wagtail. Developed with the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Music Office, the October showcase will connect First Nations country artists with audiences and professional networks while placing their cultural storytelling at the center. There is no need to pretend that this is a newly invented form of music. First Nations artists have always had stories, rhythms, instruments and relationships to land. What is changing is the willingness of major cultural institutions to listen without asking those artists to remove the parts that make their work distinct. In County Down, family and friends gathered to remember Margaret Barry, the Irish singer and banjo player whose life seems to have been assembled from equal parts talent, resilience and refusal to behave according to anyone else’s expectations. Alan Lomax recorded Barry in 1951, helping carry her street singing to an international audience. Her forceful performances influenced later generations of Irish and British folk musicians. Barry’s legacy also belongs to Traveller culture, which has too often been treated as a footnote by people who were perfectly happy to borrow its music. The songs traveled more successfully than the people who carried them. This week, County Down offered a chance to remember both. Miko Marks announced Hell or High Water, her first new studio album since 2022, for release on October 30 through Redtone Records. Produced and co-written with Justin Phipps, the album moves more directly into traditional blues while retaining the gospel, country soul and rock elements that have shaped Marks’ work. The songs were influenced by the end of her marriage and the beginning of her sobriety. Such facts are often presented in biographies as turning points, as though life were a railway timetable with neat stations and reliable departures. In reality, they are more like weather systems. They alter the landscape, flood a few roads and leave certain things visible that had previously been hidden. In Nunavut, Susan Aglukark announced For You, also known as Igvit, the lead single from her forthcoming Disco Ball EP. The song began as a poem written in 2022 and now brings together the Inuksuk Drum Dancers, Secwepemc artist Sweleyen and Inuk composer Deantha Edmunds. Part of the proceeds will support Indigenous-led youth and reconciliation organizations. A poem became a recording, the recording became a collaboration, and the collaboration became a way of directing attention and resources toward the next generation. This is a more useful form of cultural continuity than simply placing an artifact behind glass. Britain’s contemporary psych-folk scene gained a notable new entry with Sairie’s debut album, Beneath the Spreading Tree. The Guardian praised its mixture of original songs and traditional ballad material, with harmonium, violin and cello helping create a sound that acknowledges the era of Pentangle without dressing up as a historical reenactment. The album’s voice belongs to the present. This is the difficult part of working with tradition. A musician must know enough about the past to avoid making something generic, but not so much that the past starts telling them what to do. In Westmont, Illinois, a small museum is caring for more than 60 Muddy Waters artifacts, including stage clothing, photographs, personal belongings and Waters’ Grammy for The London Muddy Waters Sessions. Much of the collection was donated by his third wife, Marva Jean Brooks. The Muddy Waters Exhibit is not housed in a grand national institution. It exists in a community setting, which may be exactly right. Blues history has often survived in places that were never designed to contain history at all. A jacket, a photograph or a trophy can remain quietly important even when the building around it looks as if it was designed by someone whose main ambition was affordable carpeting. Another kind of preservation emerged from Capitol Records’ reels. Sundazed Music will release At the Mint, Las Vegas, 1968 on October 23, documenting Buck Owens, Don Rich, Doyle Holly, Tom Brumley and Jerry Wiggins at the height of the Bakersfield sound. The recordings include stage banter and material that might have been removed from a conventional live album. This is welcome news because performers are rarely most interesting when they are behaving perfectly. The stray comment, the loose joke and the small moment of disorder often reveal more than the polished performance. The tenth anniversary edition of the case lang veirs collaboration will add thirteen concert recordings from Toronto and Austin, along with a new song titled Accidental Tattoo. Neko Case, kd lang and Laura Veirs made only one album together, but the expanded release shows how much life remained in the project. Their music combined folk, country and chamber pop without appearing especially interested in explaining the arrangement. Some collaborations feel like business meetings with microphones. This one sounded more like three strong personalities discovering that the room was larger than any of them expected. Finally, James Kee signed with Mountain Home Music Company for his first solo bluegrass project, with new music expected in 2027. Kee helped found East Nash Grass and the Hamilton County Ramblers and played a role in establishing two important Nashville bluegrass residencies. The move from community-band leader to solo artist is not always a move away from community. In bluegrass, the opposite is often true. A person steps forward because years spent playing beside others have given them something worth saying alone. That may be the clearest thread running through the week. Cassandra Wilson carried Mississippi into jazz. Margaret Barry carried Traveller songs beyond County Down. Susan Aglukark turned a poem into an international gathering. Buck Owens returned from a forgotten reel. Geelong reopened a room. James Kee stepped out from behind the group without leaving the music that formed him. The music keeps moving because people keep carrying it. It crosses oceans, survives gaps of several decades, turns up in courtrooms and museum rooms, appears on charts far from its supposed home and occasionally emerges from a tape box that everyone had forgotten to open. The roads are different now, but the traffic remains heavy.

There is a line running through Lisa LeBlanc’s career that is easy to overlook because she keeps changing the music around it. In 2012, it sounded like a battered banjo, acoustic guitar and a genre description so gloriously unhelpful that it could only have been invented by someone determined to avoid being shelved properly: folk-trash. By 2016, she had absorbed Appalachian banjo, bluegrass, Cajun music, lap steel, garage rock and, because restraint has never appeared to interest her much, a ferocious banjo version of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades.” In 2022, the banjo practically vanished from sight as she released Chiac Disco, an album of funk, brass, strings and rural New Brunswick slang. Then, in the summer of 2026, she changed course again with “Whole Lotta Talkin’,” a surf-rock and 1960s-organ charge that arrived with the noisy confidence of a band accidentally allowed into a beachside dance hall after closing time. Her next major public appearance will come in November, when she takes part in M for Montréal’s 2026 Official Selection. Yet the striking thing about LeBlanc is that every stylistic shift, no matter how abrupt it may appear, leaves her sounding recognizably Acadian. That is why she deserves attention in any conversation about Americana. She is not a Francophone singer trying to imitate an English-language roots tradition. She demonstrates that rural storytelling, migration, road culture, country music, local language, working-class humour and inherited musical forms exist in Francophone North America on their own terms. LeBlanc is especially interesting because she does not preserve traditional culture by remaining close to one inherited sound. Instead, she preserves the attitude of the place she comes from. Her music has room for bad cars, cheap meals, difficult romances, long drives, small-town gossip, odd family habits and the heavy social weather of communities in which people know one another’s business long before anybody has decided to tell them. The instrumentation changes, the languages shift and the genres collide, but the geography remains steady beneath it all. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0gY57VuktOIPcAELjBeQnf?si=ca7fxhckRuu8ccenwEPr3Q&utm_source=copy-link&pi=MELcH1odQ4ejC Before Montréal LeBlanc grew up in Rosaireville, New Brunswick, in a music-loving Acadian family. Rosaireville has the kind of name that sounds as though it ought to be reached by a road that narrows gradually, passes a field containing at least one suspiciously observant cow and ends somewhere near a kitchen where everyone already knows who you are. It was there that LeBlanc began writing songs as a teenager, long before she studied at the École nationale de la chanson in Granby, Quebec, or won the Festival international de la chanson de Granby in 2010. That victory helped open the door to the Francophone Canadian music industry, and her self-titled debut followed in 2012. Produced by Louis-Jean Cormier, the album included “Cerveau ramolli,” “J’pas un cowboy,” “Kraft Dinner” and “Aujourd’hui, ma vie c’est d’la marde,” the song that became her early signature. The titles alone tell you a good deal about why the album worked. LeBlanc did not arrive with misty abstractions, grand emotional pronouncements or the sort of lyrical machinery that requires a person to stare out of a rain-streaked window while holding a mug. She wrote about boredom, failed relationships, mediocre meals, rural frustration, vulgarity, humour and the familiar sense that the day has somehow become worse without first seeking your permission. In Nashville, the same ingredients might have become country music. In Rosaireville, they became Lisa LeBlanc. Her debut eventually went platinum in Canada after selling more than 80,000 copies, and she won ADISQ’s Breakthrough Artist of the Year award. The commercial success was notable, but it was not hard to understand. LeBlanc had found a way to make ordinary life feel both intensely local and broadly recognizable. People do not need to have heroic adventures to deserve songs. They merely need to choose the wrong person, eat the wrong dinner, drive too far, stay too late or find themselves standing in the kitchen at midnight wondering how a perfectly manageable day had become such a mess. What Folk-Trash Meant LeBlanc called her early style folk-trash partly because ordinary genre labels did not fit. The foundations were clearly roots-oriented, with acoustic guitar, banjo, country phrasing and narrative songwriting, but her energy came from somewhere closer to punk, hard rock and the useful belief that politeness is often overrated. She had grown up listening to classic rock and metal and was attracted to charismatic rock performers, not merely to the conventional image of a sensitive singer-songwriter playing quietly in a room where everyone has been asked to respect the acoustic set. That difference is important. The banjo did not make LeBlanc traditional. It became an instrument she could attack. Many people think of the banjo as a cheerful device intended for porches, straw hats and people who are entirely too pleased to have discovered a washboard. But a five-string banjo, especially in the hands of a good player, can be startlingly forceful. Bluegrass musicians have known this for decades. It can be fast, sharp, relentless and rhythmically violent in the most satisfying way. LeBlanc made the point especially well when she arranged Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” for banjo. The concept sounds like a novelty until the performance begins. Instead of treating the song as a joke, she discovered how easily bluegrass attack and metal aggression could fit together. Both styles are built on speed, stamina and a willingness to make an instrument sound as though it has a personal grievance. LeBlanc found that a clean studio setting made the arrangement feel too tidy, so she re-recorded her vocals after touring, when the roughness and volume of the stage performance had entered her voice. That instinct placed her firmly in a roots tradition that treats inherited music as living material rather than as something too precious to touch. Following the Road South LeBlanc’s connection to Americana became more explicit in the middle of the 2010s, when she spent extensive time traveling through the United States and exploring Southern roots music. Her journey began in Nashville and continued through Louisiana, Austin and Asheville, but the most important stop was Blackpot Camp in Eunice, Louisiana. There she encountered Appalachian banjo, traditional Cajun songs, bluegrass flatpicking, square dancing, Louisiana two-step and the dense web of musical traditions that has made the region one of North America’s great cultural crossroads. Her 2014 EP, Highways, Heartaches and Time Well Wasted, already reflected the experience. It included the traditional ballad “Katie Cruel” alongside original songs full of highway imagery, whiskey, romantic transience and people who seemed genetically incapable of making a stable decision. “You Look Like Trouble (But I Guess I Do Too)” had the spirit of a classic road song, with two people recognizing danger in one another and deciding, with the usual human confidence, that this was probably a promising basis for a relationship. By the time LeBlanc released Why You Wanna Leave, Runaway Queen? in 2016, the influence of the American South had become fully integrated into her work. Banjo appeared beside lap steel, electric guitar, blues, bluegrass, Cajun accents and garage-rock energy. She had spent months playing old-time, bluegrass and Cajun music and initially imagined the project as an acoustic record. But her rock instincts were too strong, and she recognized that the traditions she had studied did not require her to abandon her own voice. That decision explains much of what makes her effective. LeBlanc learns from musical traditions without turning them into costumes. She does not put on an Appalachian hat, borrow a Cajun phrase and announce that she has become a scholar of the American South. She takes what she has heard, filters it through Acadian experience and makes something that sounds like her own life. Louisiana and Acadia For an Acadian musician, Louisiana carries meanings that go well beyond the ordinary romance of Southern music. Beginning in 1755, the British deported Acadians from what is now Atlantic Canada during the Grand Dérangement. Some eventually settled in Louisiana, where Acadian culture developed over generations into what became Cajun culture. Modern Acadian New Brunswick and Cajun Louisiana are not interchangeable, and it would be foolish to pretend that centuries of separate history have not produced different languages, customs and musical traditions. But the historical relationship remains real, and it carries emotional force. LeBlanc has returned to Louisiana repeatedly and has spoken about the sense of recognition she feels there. During reporting around her 2023 return to Festival International de Louisiane, she noted the similarities she perceived between Lafayette and Moncton and described the connection between Acadians in the north and their southern relatives. She had already appeared at the festival several times, and Louisiana had become more than a useful place to collect musical influences. It was a place where history, language and family memory seemed to converge. That relationship became especially clear in 2021 when LeBlanc joined Salebarbes to record “Bonsoir Moreau,” a Cajun classic associated with fiddle player Canray Fontenot and accordionist Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin. LeBlanc first encountered the song at Blackpot Camp in Eunice, and the resulting recording, with its fiddles and group vocals, became an intentionally northern Acadian tribute to Louisiana cousins. It is one of the most revealing recordings in her catalogue because it makes a larger North American story audible. A song rooted in Louisiana Cajun and Creole traditions travels north, is embraced by Acadian musicians and becomes part of a continuing exchange between regions connected by migration, memory and language. That is roots music at its most useful. It is not a museum display. It is a conversation that has been going on for centuries. Chiac and the Language of Home The other essential element in LeBlanc’s work is Chiac, the regional variety of Acadian French associated particularly with southeastern New Brunswick. Chiac is sometimes reduced to the term Franglais, which is not completely inaccurate but is rather like calling a complicated family recipe “food with ingredients.” It includes English borrowing and code-switching, but it is shaped by French grammar, Acadian speech patterns, local history and the accumulated habits of people who have spent generations making language work in the place where they live. Chiac has often been stigmatized as improper French, particularly by people who prefer language to remain tidy, standardized and safely contained within textbooks. But language has never behaved that way in real life. People borrow words, blend expressions, preserve older structures and create local phrases that may look strange on a page but make immediate sense across a kitchen table. LeBlanc understands this instinctively. She does not merely insert the occasional English word into otherwise standardized French songs. She writes in the rhythms and vocabulary of her region. Her 2023 title “Quoi-ce tu fais ça pour?” uses a form associated with Rosaireville rather than standard French. To an outsider, it may look like an irregularity. To LeBlanc, it is songwriting material. To many Acadian listeners, it is simply the language of home. That distinction matters enormously for Americana, a genre that has long celebrated regional English. Appalachian grammar, Texas phrasing, Cajun English, rural idioms and local pronunciation are routinely treated as signs of authenticity. There is no coherent reason to treat Acadian French differently. If a singer from Kentucky can sing in the language of Kentucky, a singer from southeastern New Brunswick can sing in Chiac. LeBlanc does not seek permission. When Rural New Brunswick Went Disco The fullest expression of that idea arrived with Chiac Disco in 2022. Co-produced by LeBlanc and Benoît Morier, the album replaced much of her familiar acoustic roots palette with disco, funk, soul, strings, horns and 1970s glamour. The musical references included Chic, James Brown, Lee Hazlewood and William Onyeabor, which may seem like an unusual guest list for a singer who had once been closely identified with banjo and folk-trash. But the more one listens, the more logical it becomes. Chiac Disco places rural southeastern New Brunswick in sequins. Its songs concern gossip, procrastination, exhaustion, awkward social behavior, woodpiles, family meals and the intimate social economy of small towns. LeBlanc described the concept as placing rurality against glamour, and it is difficult to imagine a better summary. The record asks why an artist from rural New Brunswick should be expected to present regional culture only through acoustic instruments, heritage clothing and respectful nostalgia. Why not brass, strings, funk and a mirror ball? The question is more serious than it first appears. Rural culture is frequently welcomed into popular music only under specific visual rules. It must look traditional, sound acoustic and arrive carrying some visible evidence of heritage. LeBlanc’s achievement with Chiac Disco was to insist that contemporary Acadian identity could be glamorous, absurd, modern, funny, restless and still entirely rooted in place. The album was recognized accordingly. It reached the Polaris Music Prize shortlist, received a Juno nomination for Francophone Album of the Year and won major ADISQ honors, including Pop Album of the Year and Record Production of the Year. The banjo may have stepped out of the center of the picture, but the roots remained exactly where they had always been: in the language, the humour, the social observation and the continuing tension between leaving home and being permanently shaped by it. Language Never Stands Still LeBlanc has also resisted the easy assumption that French is automatically more authentic for her than English. Her 2014 and 2016 projects moved heavily into English, partly because many of the artists who shaped her musical imagination were Anglophone. She began experimenting with English songwriting early, although she initially found that French gave her more expressive power. What is especially interesting is that her work in English sometimes encouraged her to push her French material further into Acadian territory. While discussing Why You Wanna Leave, Runaway Queen?, she explained that writing mostly in English gave her the freedom to make her French songs more distinctly Acadian, more strongly connected to local slang and more open to Louisiana influence. Rather than treating the two languages as opposing choices, she uses them as parts of the same creative world. That continues with “Whole Lotta Talkin’,” her 2026 English-language single. The song uses surf-rock guitar and Farfisa-style organ rather than banjo or fiddle, but it does not sound like an attempt to escape her roots. It sounds like another turn in a career built on motion. Language in LeBlanc’s work behaves much as it does in her home region: fluidly, practically and without much concern for the categories that outsiders find reassuring. Five Essential Recordings “Aujourd’hui, ma vie c’est d’la marde” from Lisa LeBlanc, 2012, is the starting point. It brings together acoustic roots instrumentation, direct regional French, humour and emotional collapse in a song that is both intensely Acadian and immediately recognizable to anyone who has experienced the ordinary disaster of a bad day. It explains why LeBlanc’s debut could feel deeply local while also speaking to the larger country and roots tradition of hard luck songs. “You Look Like Trouble (But I Guess I Do Too)” from Highways, Heartaches and Time Well Wasted, 2014, captures her highway-Americana phase. Sung in English, it is a road song about two people drawn together partly because neither appears capable of stability. Its imagery and atmosphere place LeBlanc comfortably beside North American alt-country and roots songwriters. “Ace of Spades” from Why You Wanna Leave, Runaway Queen?, 2016, is the recording for anyone who thinks banjo music cannot be loud, fast or dangerous. LeBlanc turns the Motörhead classic into an argument for the violent rhythmic potential of traditional instrumentation. Bluegrass speed and metal aggression suddenly sound much less distant from one another. “Bonsoir Moreau” with Salebarbes, released in 2021, is perhaps the most culturally revealing roots recording in her catalogue. It connects a Louisiana Cajun and Creole standard with contemporary Acadian performers in the north, making the long historical relationship between Louisiana and Atlantic Canada audible in the present. “Pourquoi faire aujourd’hui” from Chiac Disco, 2022, makes the broader case. Even when the arrangement becomes disco-funk, LeBlanc’s regional language, humour and small-town observation remain intact. It shows that roots music does not require one fixed instrumental palette. The sound can change completely while the sense of place remains. A Larger Career, A Wider Map LeBlanc’s career has become much larger than the regional story from which it began. Her first three releases sold more than 140,000 copies, and she has toured across Canada, the United States and Europe. Following Chiac Disco, she performed more than 140 additional shows across North America, Europe and Japan. In 2024, she added another unexpected chapter with Live avec l’Orchestre symphonique de Québec, recorded with an ensemble of 63 classical musicians. She has also worked as a producer, including on Édith Butler’s Le tour du Grand Bois. Butler is one of the central figures in modern Acadian music, making LeBlanc’s production role part of a larger generational story. She is not simply making records of her own. She is helping sustain and reshape a living Acadian musical culture. Now she appears ready for another shift. After releasing “Whole Lotta Talkin’” in June 2026 and appearing at Acadian National Day celebrations in Dieppe in August, she has been named to the 2026 Official Selection for M for Montréal. Her November 19 showcase at Théâtre Plaza arrives at a moment when LeBlanc seems once again to be opening a new stylistic door, though experience suggests it would be unwise to guess exactly what lies behind it. Why Lisa LeBlanc Matters Lisa LeBlanc exposes a weakness in the way Americana is often defined. If the genre means only music that resembles an acoustic Nashville record, then she regularly moves beyond it. She makes garage rock, bluegrass-informed banjo music, Cajun-influenced material, funk, disco and surf-rock. She sings in French, Chiac and English. She can turn a Motörhead song into a banjo assault, then follow it by placing rural New Brunswick inside a glittering disco arrangement. But if Americana means music rooted in North American place, vernacular speech, rural experience, working life, migration, inherited traditions, community memory and local storytelling, then LeBlanc never leaves the territory at all. Her New Brunswick contains the same materials that fill the Americana canon: bad cars, long roads, heartbreak, cheap meals, woodpiles, neighbours who know too much, people who leave town, people who return, music made in kitchens and bars, regional language and a complicated relationship with the larger culture beyond the town limits. What changes is the vocabulary. The truck may be described in Chiac. The traditional relative may live in Louisiana. The country song may contain French rather than English. The banjo player may eventually make a disco record. None of that makes the experience less rooted in North America. It makes the map more accurate. LeBlanc’s most important contribution may therefore be linguistic as much as musical. She refuses to translate regional identity into the standardized language outsiders expect before presenting it to them. She sings the way people around her speak, and in doing so she claims a privilege that country music, blues, Appalachian music and Cajun music have always claimed for themselves. Lisa LeBlanc claims that privilege for Acadia. Once that is accepted, Americana becomes more interesting than an English-language genre. It becomes a record of how people across North America turn local speech, inherited memory, difficult weather, personal disappointment, regional pride and the ordinary absurdity of everyday life into song.

1. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass unveils its 2026 lineup San Francisco’s free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival announced its first performers for October 2–4 in Golden Gate Park, including AJ Lee & Blue Summit, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Hiss Golden Messenger, Kathleen Edwards, and Old Crow Medicine Show. The festival also announced an October 1 Steve Earle tribute benefit featuring Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, Elizabeth Cook, Jackson Browne, Hot Tuna, and others. ABC7 / Bay City News⁠ 2. IBMA announces 2026 Industry and Momentum Award nominees The International Bluegrass Music Association released its nominee slate for awards recognizing both behind-the-scenes contributors and emerging artists. Momentum Band of the Year nominees include The Creekers, ShadowGrass, Remedy Tree, The Cody Sisters, and Under the Rocks; winners will be announced during the World of Bluegrass convention. Bluegrass Today⁠ 3. Charles Wesley Godwin’s Christian Name receives new Americana coverage A July 22 review examined Charles Wesley Godwin’s Christian Name, an album rooted in grief, faith, and recovery. It includes collaborations with Luke Combs and Wyatt Flores, was produced by Al Torrence, and takes its title and cover-art inspiration from Godwin’s late grandfather, a Methodist preacher. Americana Highways⁠ 4. Louisa Branscomb’s “Steel Rails” lands in an HBO documentary Songwriter Louisa Branscomb’s “Steel Rails” was set to appear in the third episode of HBO’s The Man Will Burn on July 23. The song was written in 1971, first released by Branscomb in 1977, and has also been recorded by Alison Krauss, John Denver, and Mel Tillis. Bluegrass Today⁠ 5. Sally Baby’s Silver Dollars receives a globalFEST touring grant New Orleans band Sally Baby’s Silver Dollars was named one of six recipients of the revived globalFEST Touring Fund, which supports artists’ touring costs. The group, which performs original New Orleans R&B dance-hall music and Creole jazz, was scheduled to tour from July through October. OffBeat⁠ · globalFEST announcement⁠

This was not a quiet week in Americana. It was a week of loss, return, reinvention and remembrance. Dolly Parton, one of the great cultural figures ever produced by Appalachia, died at 80. Alabama Shakes returned with their first album in more than a decade. Billy Strings released one of the most personal records of his career and then went home to Michigan to help build a new bluegrass gathering around the community that shaped him. Elsewhere, veteran roots bands confronted the harsh economics of touring, Canadian folk continued to expand beyond old definitions, Irish and British musicians revisited traditions without embalming them, and an Australian festival suddenly found itself leaning further toward Americana after an unexpected lineup change. It was also a reminder that Americana has long since ceased to be a strictly American conversation. This week stretches from Appalachia to Ontario, Glasgow, Ireland and Australia, with musicians on several continents drawing from the same broad vocabulary of folk memory, blues, country, migration, storytelling and place. DOLLY PARTON AND THE LOSS OF AN APPALACHIAN GIANT Dolly Parton died in Nashville on August 25 following a brief battle with cancer. She was 80. It is difficult to describe her influence without making her sound less interesting than she actually was. She was a country singer, certainly, but that barely begins to explain the scale of what she represented. Parton carried the culture of East Tennessee into virtually every corner of American life while remaining recognizably connected to the place that made her. She wrote songs that became standards. She crossed comfortably between country, bluegrass, pop and gospel. She made Jolene feel both ancient and immediate. She helped turn Trio, alongside Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, into one of the defining harmony records of its generation. Then she built Dollywood. Then she created the Imagination Library and quietly placed millions of books into the hands of children. Few performers have managed to become both a global celebrity and a regional cultural ambassador without one identity swallowing the other. Parton never seemed embarrassed by Appalachia. She elevated it. The rhinestones, big hair and carefully cultivated humor sometimes obscured just how sophisticated she was as a songwriter, storyteller and businesswoman. She understood that authenticity does not require austerity. You could come from a cabin in the Smoky Mountains and still build an entertainment empire. Her death closes a remarkable chapter in American music, but the songs, institutions and cultural confidence she helped create will remain everywhere. ALABAMA SHAKES COME BACK SWINGING Three days after Parton’s death, Alabama Shakes returned with I Must Be Dreaming, their first album since Sound and Color in 2015. The reunion began almost casually. Brittany Howard accepted an invitation to perform a benefit connected to a Tuscaloosa brewery and food pantry. That brought her back together with guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell. The chemistry remained. What followed became an eleven song record filled with blues, soul, psychedelic textures and the kind of muscular Southern groove that made Alabama Shakes one of the most distinctive American bands of the previous decade. Eleven years is a long absence in popular music. What makes the return interesting is that Alabama Shakes never sounded particularly interested in chasing the fashions of the moment in the first place. Their music drew from older traditions without behaving like revivalism. Howard could summon gospel intensity, rock aggression and soul phrasing inside the same song. The band could sound as if it belonged in a 1960s Muscle Shoals studio and then suddenly veer somewhere stranger. I Must Be Dreaming brings that tension back into contemporary roots music. It is less a nostalgia exercise than a reminder that Southern soul, blues and roots rock still have considerable territory left to explore. BILLY STRINGS TURNS GRIEF INTO BLUEGRASS Billy Strings released So Much for Goodbyes on August 28. The record arrives carrying enormous emotional weight. Strings’ mother, Debra, died from an overdose in 2025. The loss runs through an album concerned with addiction, mourning, family inheritance and the complicated ways trauma travels between generations. That subject matter matters because Billy Strings occupies an unusual position in contemporary bluegrass. He is simultaneously one of the genre’s most technically gifted traditionalists and one of the few bluegrass musicians capable of filling arenas with listeners who may have arrived through jam bands, rock music or psychedelia rather than Bill Monroe. So Much for Goodbyes does not abandon that virtuosity. It simply gives it something heavier to carry. The playing remains extraordinary, but the emotional center of the album is not instrumental display. It is the attempt to understand what remains after somebody disappears. For a musician who helped turn bluegrass into a large scale contemporary concert experience, this is an inward looking record. That may ultimately make it one of his most important. FRUITION AND THE ECONOMICS OF SURVIVING ON THE ROAD Not every important Americana story this week arrived with a triumphant headline. Fruition released Something More on August 28 and simultaneously announced that the band would withdraw from live performance following a final tour scheduled to end January 29 in Seattle. The explanation deserves attention far beyond the band’s own audience. Fuel costs have increased. Flights cost more. Hotels cost more. Food costs more. The basic expense of moving several musicians and their equipment across the country continues to climb. Club guarantees have not necessarily followed. That creates an uncomfortable arithmetic for independent touring musicians. A band can have an audience, a respected catalog and years of experience and still discover that the road no longer makes economic sense. Americana has always romanticized touring. The van, the highway, the motel, the club with fifty people on a Tuesday night in some distant town. Those images are embedded in the mythology of American music. But mythology does not pay for diesel. Fruition’s decision is therefore more than a band announcement. It is a warning about the middle class of the live music economy. If respected working bands cannot make touring viable, something important disappears between the stadium acts at the top and the hobbyists at the bottom. VETERANS TURN THEIR STORIES INTO SONGS SongwritingWith:Soldiers announced The Power of Being Heard, a fifteen song collection scheduled for release on November 6. The project represents the experiences of 24 veterans and brings them together with songwriters and performers including Radney Foster, Kelly Willis, Will Kimbrough, Erin Enderlin and Gary Nicholson. Since 2012, the nonprofit has worked with more than 7,000 veterans and military family members. The premise is deceptively simple. A person tells a story. A songwriter listens. Together they turn memory into music. That process places songwriting back in one of its oldest roles. Before songs became commercial products, they were ways of storing experience. Work songs did it. Ballads did it. Gospel did it. Blues did it. The Power of Being Heard extends that tradition into contemporary military life, using country and roots songwriting as a form of testimony. THE CARTER FAMILY RETURNS TO THE CENTER OF THE CIRCLE The Carter Family received the ACM Poet’s Award during ACM Honors on August 29. Descendants including Carlene Carter and John Carter Cash accepted the recognition, while Brenda Lee joined the family for Can the Circle Be Unbroken. Margo Price and Logan Ledger also performed a tribute medley. There are few catalogs more foundational to Americana. The Carter Family helped establish the vocabulary from which later country, folk and bluegrass musicians built entire careers. Their songs moved through radio, records, front porches, churches, festivals and family songbooks until it sometimes became difficult to remember exactly where the material began. That is what happens when music becomes tradition. Eventually the song stops belonging entirely to the person who first recorded it. It belongs to everybody who keeps singing it. BILLY STRINGS GOES HOME The inaugural Ionia Freak Fair took place on August 30, bringing Billy Strings back to the Michigan region where he grew up. The lineup included Greensky Bluegrass, Sierra Hull, Leftover Salmon, Michael Cleveland, Lindsay Lou and Full Cord. There were numerous sit ins and collaborations throughout the event, eventually building toward a large finale. Strings and Lindsay Lou also performed The Last Thing on My Mind in tribute to Dolly Parton. The gathering feels significant because bluegrass has always been strongest when festivals function as communities rather than simply sequences of performances. Musicians wander into each other’s sets. Songs travel between generations. Somebody plays something that was not on the schedule. A festival becomes less like a concert and more like a temporary town. The first Ionia Freak Fair suggested that Strings may be interested in building exactly that kind of institution around the place that made him. BERNARD ALLISON BUILDS A BLUES SUMMIT Bernard Allison announced Loving You, scheduled for release on October 16 through Germany’s Ruf Records. His regular band will be joined by Devon Allman, Larry McCray, Matthew Curry, Victor Wainwright and Heather Hardy. The guest list alone makes the album noteworthy. Allison inherited one of the great family names in modern blues from his father, Luther Allison, but his own career has increasingly become a bridge between generations and branches of contemporary blues. Loving You appears designed around that idea. It connects family lineage with musicians representing Southern blues rock, electric blues, piano driven roots music and the modern international blues festival circuit. The fact that the record arrives through a German label is also a reminder of something American blues musicians have known for decades. Europe remains one of the most important homes for American roots music outside America itself. JIM JAMES RETURNS TO HIS SOLO WORK My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James released Wowed Out on August 28, his first solo album in eight years. Some of the material began during sessions developed with composer Brian Reitzell in the early 2010s. The resulting record moves through folk, soul and psychedelic textures while James writes about overstimulation, depression, acceptance and cautious optimism. James has always occupied an interesting borderland within Americana. My Morning Jacket can sound like Southern rock one moment, cosmic country the next and psychedelic soul shortly afterward. His solo work tends to push even further toward abstraction. Wowed Out continues that tendency while remaining grounded in the emotional directness that has always connected his music to the roots tradition. CANADIAN FOLK KEEPS GETTING BIGGER The Ontario Folk Music Awards announced a particularly broad field of nominees on August 26. Artists include Amanda Rheaume, Angelique Francis, Aysanabee, Great Lake Swimmers, Julian Taylor, Logan Staats and Mimi O’Bonsawin. Even more telling is the album category. The nominations move between roots songwriting, blues and Spanish language music, including Eliana Cuevas and Mi Pequena. This is what modern Canadian folk increasingly looks like. Not a narrow recreation of one historical tradition, but a meeting place for Indigenous musicians, immigrant traditions, blues artists, singer songwriters and multilingual performers. Canada’s folk ecosystem has become particularly good at allowing regional and cultural identities to remain visible rather than forcing everything into one generic acoustic category. That makes it worth watching closely. GRIEVOUS ANGELS RETURN TO PROTEST MUSIC Canadian roots band Grievous Angels released In the Time of Monsters on August 28. The politically charged song appears on Revolution and addresses authoritarianism along with growing tensions in Canada’s relationship with the United States. The album also marks a new chapter for bandleader Charlie Angus following the end of his twenty year parliamentary career. Politics and roots music have never been strangers. Folk songs have carried labor disputes, wars, elections, migration, injustice and class anger for generations. For Grievous Angels, returning fully to music after Angus’ political career creates an interesting reversal. Instead of a musician entering politics, this is a politician returning to the older political instrument. The song. AUSTRALIA’S STRUMMINGBIRD FESTIVAL TURNS TOWARD ROOTS MUSIC Australia’s Strummingbird festivals were forced into a significant lineup change after Post Malone postponed his Australian and Asian touring commitments. Rather than cancel the October events, organizers added Tyler Childers and Sam Barber for Australian exclusive appearances, along with James Johnston at all three locations. The result is almost accidentally interesting. A festival originally built around a large crossover star has moved substantially closer to contemporary Americana and roots country. Tyler Childers in particular brings a very different cultural gravity to the bill. His music is rooted in Kentucky, Appalachian storytelling, working class identity, country, gospel and old time influences. An unexpected cancellation may therefore have given Australian audiences a festival lineup that better demonstrates where some of the most interesting American country music is currently coming from. BRANDON FLOWERS TOPS THE BRITISH AMERICANA CHART Brandon Flowers entered the United Kingdom’s Official Americana Albums Chart at number one with Thrasher. The album was recorded in Nashville. Elsewhere on the chart, Stella Lefty debuted at number four with Long Way Home, while Lambchop entered at number seven with Punching the Clown. Charts are never perfect measures of culture, but this week’s movement is revealing. Americana in Britain continues to function less like a tightly policed genre and more like a broad listening category. Nashville songwriting, indie folk, alternative country and experimental roots music can all exist under the same umbrella. That flexibility is one of the reasons Americana continues to travel so effectively outside the United States. THE WATERBOYS REOPEN FISHERMAN’S BLUES The Waterboys launched their new Fisherman’s Blues Revue at Glasgow’s OVO Hydro on August 30. Steve Earle joined Mike Scott for material of his own as well as a reworked duet version of And a Bang on the Ear. The interesting thing about the revue is that it does not attempt to simply reproduce the 1988 Fisherman’s Blues album. Instead, the Waterboys are reopening the music. Guest performers and new arrangements allow its mixture of Irish folk, country, fiddle music and rock to change shape again. That is probably the correct way to approach a record like Fisherman’s Blues. Traditional music survives through mutation. A song that cannot withstand reinterpretation is unlikely to become tradition in the first place. FAIRPORT CONVENTION APPROACHES SIXTY YEARS Fairport Convention announced a 24 date autumn tour beginning October 6 and running through intimate venues across England and Wales. The tour leads toward the band’s diamond anniversary in 2027. Sixty years is an extraordinary lifespan for any musical institution. It is especially remarkable for a band associated with the creation of British folk rock, a genre that once sounded like a radical collision between electric rock music and songs that had existed for generations. Today that combination feels natural largely because bands such as Fairport Convention made it so. Their continued touring presence shows that British roots music has its own long running institutions, scenes and audiences every bit as durable as their American counterparts. DAMIEN DEMPSEY TREATS BALLADS AS LIVING HISTORY Irish singer Damien Dempsey released Holywell, his eleventh album, on August 28. The record reinterprets twelve Irish ballads and folk standards using pipes, fiddle, whistle, bodhran, banjo and bouzouki. The repertoire includes Gaelic laments, rebel songs, stories of emigration and memories passed through families. Dempsey’s approach matters because traditional music can easily become ceremonial. Songs are respected, preserved and performed, but somehow separated from everyday life. Holywell pushes in the opposite direction. The ballads remain connected to working people, migration, political struggle, family memory and place. They are not artifacts. They are evidence. THE ROAD CONTINUES What connected this week was not a single genre. It was inheritance. Dolly Parton carried Appalachian culture into the global mainstream without surrendering her regional identity. Billy Strings turned family grief into contemporary bluegrass. Damien Dempsey returned to Irish ballads. The Waterboys reopened their own folk rock history. The Carter Family was honored for songs that became part of the cultural commons. Meanwhile, younger and contemporary artists continue moving those traditions outward. Canadian folk is becoming increasingly multilingual and multicultural. Australian audiences are getting deeper exposure to Appalachian influenced country music. British Americana charts continue to welcome artists who sit somewhere between country, folk, indie rock and Southern songwriting. That is the real strength of Americana. It has never been one sound. It is a conversation between places, families, songs and memories. Sometimes that conversation happens around a bluegrass festival in Michigan. Sometimes it happens in a Glasgow arena, an Irish ballad, an Ontario awards ceremony or a Nashville recording studio. And sometimes an entire musical culture pauses to remember somebody like Dolly Parton, who spent a lifetime proving that the road from a mountain community in East Tennessee could lead almost anywhere.

There is a moment in a Larry and Joe show when the old categories quit working. Larry Bellorin stands behind the arpa llanera, the tall harp of the Venezuelan and Colombian plains. Joe Troop holds a five-string banjo. One instrument comes from the cattle country of the Orinoco, with its horses, rivers, ranch work and hard-driving joropo rhythms. The other carries Appalachia with it: old-time tunes, bluegrass rolls, Doc Watson, freight trains and the long American argument over what counts as roots music. Then they play together. The harp does not soften the banjo. The banjo does not turn the harp into a novelty. They sound as if they have been waiting in separate rooms for somebody to open the door. Larry and Joe are Bellorin, a Venezuelan master of musica llanera, and Troop, a North Carolina bluegrass musician whose work has long pushed beyond the usual boundaries of the form. They sing in Spanish and English. They move through joropo, bluegrass, folk, old country material and songs of migration. They call parts of what they do Latingrass and Venezualachian. Increasingly, they call it a Pan-American songbook. That last phrase is the important one. The music of Larry and Joe is not simply fusion. It is not a bluegrass act with a little Latin color added for effect. It is a meeting of two rural music traditions that have more in common than the old labels allowed people to hear. Both come from working landscapes. Both have horse culture. Both love acoustic virtuosity. Both rely on rhythm, oral tradition, rural memory and songs about leaving home. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4vVmfhbtALVqBhs1PaQ31R?si=VM_Hm_7dS8adWACOAQzHcg&utm_source=copy-link&pi=RlwETZ-CSV-TP The trees are different. The human story is not. Bellorin comes from Monagas in eastern Venezuela. He began on the cuatro, the small four-string instrument at the center of Venezuelan traditional music, and was supporting himself as a musician while still a child. By his early teens, he had become proficient on several instruments. He later studied under llanera harpist Urbino Ruiz, who brought him onto a 1999 concert with the celebrated Venezuelan singer Reynaldo Armas. In front of an audience of more than 8,000, Armas introduced the young musician as “el maestro Larry Bellorin.” Bellorin went on to accompany major Venezuelan artists including Cristina Maica, Teo Galindez and Rummy Olivo. With his wife, he founded Casa Vieja, a school dedicated to musica llanera. The school taught close to 500 students over roughly three years and helped establish a regional festival for the tradition. This matters because Bellorin did not arrive in North Carolina as a musician looking to be folded into an American genre. He came as the bearer of a complete musical culture. Musica llanera comes from the llanos, the broad tropical grasslands of Venezuela and Colombia. It is a music of ranching, horses, cattle work, improvisation and distance. The usual ensemble uses harp or bandola for melody, with cuatro and maracas supplying the rhythmic force, often joined by bass. Joropo, one of its central forms, is syncopated, percussive and fast. The harp can carry harmony, bass and rhythm at once. The maracas do not decorate the beat. They drive it. To an American listener, the sound can make the idea of cowboy music feel suddenly incomplete. The North American West did not invent the singing horseman. The Venezuelan and Colombian plains have their own riders, cattle routes, rural myths and songs of open land. The llanero and the American cowboy come from different histories, but both became powerful symbols of work, freedom, isolation and belonging. Bellorin’s path to North Carolina was not planned. He came to the United States in 2016 amid Venezuela’s political and economic crisis and became an asylum seeker. In Raleigh, he worked construction to support his family. The job took a physical toll. During that time, he suffered injuries to his hands, including a construction accident that fractured one of them. For a musician, the danger was plain. He could lose the ability to play. Joe Troop was coming home at about the same time, though by another road. Troop grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He saw Doc Watson perform as a child and became absorbed in string-band music. He learned banjo, fiddle and guitar, then followed the music beyond the usual bluegrass circuit. He spent years in Argentina, teaching banjo and forming Che Apalache, a multinational string band that blended bluegrass with Latin American traditions. Che Apalache released *Rearrange My Heart* in 2019. Produced by Bela Fleck, the album was nominated for Best Folk Album at the 2020 Grammy Awards. The band had already begun asking a question Troop would carry into his work with Bellorin: What happens when Appalachian string music is played in direct conversation with Latin American rhythm, language and repertoire? The pandemic interrupted Che Apalache. Troop returned to North Carolina and became involved in migrant advocacy, including work with asylum seekers in Nogales, Mexico. In late 2021, a friend told him about a Venezuelan musician living in Raleigh and working construction. She sent him videos of Bellorin. Troop was stunned. Their first real collaboration came in December 2021 at The Fruit in Durham. The setup was almost absurd. Troop had invited Bellorin to take part in a residency performance, but he got COVID during the time they were meant to rehearse. When they finally met to work, they had around an hour before taking the stage. Troop later called what happened “immediate alchemy.” The audience gave them a standing ovation. Bellorin had a more romantic phrase for it: “amor musical a primera vista.” Musical love at first sight. Within about 13 months, the pair had made their first album. By January 2023, Bellorin had left construction, and both men had committed to Larry and Joe full time. Their 2023 album, *Nuevo South Train*, introduced the basic proposition. The record included Venezuelan standards such as Simon Diaz’s “Caballo Viejo,” “La Tonada del Cabrestero” and “Mi Querencia,” alongside bluegrass and old-country material, including “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” It also included originals such as “Nuevo South Train,” “Gabanjo,” “Larry’s Cachapa” and “Border Wall.” “Caballo Viejo” is a useful place to begin. Diaz’s song is one of the great Venezuelan standards, a late-life love song built around an old horse that finds desire again. Larry and Joe keep the llanera pulse intact but let the harp and banjo exchange melodic space. The song gallops. The connection to horse culture is audible. It does not need to be explained. Their second album, *Manos Panamericanos*, released in September 2024, widened the map. The title plays on *manos*, meaning hands, and the word *hermanos*, or brothers. The album draws not only on Venezuela and Appalachia but also on Panamanian, Argentine, Peruvian, Caribbean and other Latin American traditions. On “La Partida,” music by Venezuelan composer Carlos Bonnet meets Bellorin’s cuatro and bass, Troop’s banjo and Peruvian musician Tony Succar on cajon. On “Ya Volvere a la Sierra Blue Ridge,” the geography becomes even more direct. The title joins Spanish language longing with the Blue Ridge Mountains. The song moves between Spanish and English, not as a lesson or a translation, but as if both languages belong in the same mountain song. That is the real achievement of Larry and Joe. The music no longer divides neatly into Bellorin’s half and Troop’s half. The sounds have learned to live together. In a June 2026 interview, Troop said the duo had played nearly 500 shows in 39 states since first collaborating and had begun developing a third album. Bellorin said the pair had reached a point where the music felt like its own thing rather than two separate traditions placed beside one another. On June 20, 2026, World Refugee Day, they released “Where Would I Go Running?” Recorded live in Durham in February, it is a song about migration, displacement and the question of where any person might go if the world around them broke apart. Bellorin sings and plays harp. Troop sings lead and plays guitar. The song is not a departure from their story. It is the story. Larry and Joe are based in North Carolina, and that fact is as important as the instrumentation. This is not a distant world-music experiment staged in a cultural capital. It is happening in the modern South, where Latino communities are part of the region’s present and future. The music recognizes something that much of Americana has been slow to admit: the South is already multilingual. Its roots are already mixed. Bluegrass does not lose anything when it speaks Spanish. Musica llanera does not become less Venezuelan when it answers a banjo. The opposite happens. The contrast makes each tradition clearer. You hear how rhythmic the banjo can be. You hear how fierce and percussive a harp can sound. You hear that both musics depend on speed, precision, memory, storytelling and musicians challenging one another in public. Larry and Joe do not make Americana more inclusive as an act of charity. They show that the category has always been too small. The music of the Americas has always traveled through work, migration, exile, trade, marriage, radio, touring and chance. Instruments crossed borders. Songs crossed languages. People crossed landscapes and carried home with them in the music. Larry Bellorin and Joe Troop make that history audible. When the Venezuelan harp meets the Carolina banjo, it does not sound like two separate musical continents. It sounds like one large neighborhood.

There is a temptation with Dolly Parton to talk about everything except the music. The wigs. The rhinestones. Dollywood. The jokes about her figure. The husband who stayed almost completely out of sight. The literacy program. The movies. The business empire. The fact that she somehow became one of the few American celebrities who could walk into rooms occupied by people who agreed on almost nothing and leave with nearly everybody still liking her. All of that matters. But it can also obscure the central fact of Dolly Parton’s life. She was a songwriter. A frighteningly good one. And that is where any serious consideration of Dolly has to begin. The Mountains Came First Parton came out of the mountains of East Tennessee carrying something older than Nashville. Born January 19, 1946, in Sevier County, Tennessee, she was the fourth of twelve children born to Robert Lee Parton and Avie Lee Owens Parton. The family had little money, and Dolly never attempted to sand the rough edges off that history. Poverty was not something invented later for a press release. It was part of the physical landscape of her childhood. So was music. There were mountain songs, church hymns, old ballads, family singing and the voices of people who knew how to tell stories because storytelling was one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available. Her mother sang. Her maternal grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher. Her uncle Bill Owens recognized that the little girl had something unusual and helped her find opportunities to perform. Dolly was appearing on local radio and television while she was still a child. At thirteen, she recorded “Puppy Love” and appeared at the Grand Ole Opry. Then came Nashville. She graduated from high school in 1964 and left for Music City the next day. There is something almost absurdly perfect about that detail. No period of reflection. No sensible backup plan. School was finished. Nashville was waiting. She went. Porter Wagoner and the Price of Leaving Parton’s major public breakthrough came in 1967 when Porter Wagoner brought her onto The Porter Wagoner Show. Wagoner was already a star. Dolly was not. The partnership changed that. Together they became one of country’s defining male and female duet acts, recording songs built around the tension between his commanding baritone and her high, unmistakable Appalachian voice. Wagoner gave Parton national exposure and a place inside the country establishment. But Dolly Parton was never designed to remain somebody else’s supporting character. By the early 1970s she had developed a solo identity powerful enough to exist independently of Wagoner. Their eventual separation was professionally and emotionally difficult. Dolly’s response was characteristic. She wrote a song. “I Will Always Love You” was written as a farewell to Wagoner and released in 1974. It was not an attack and it was not a surrender. It was something more sophisticated. Thank you. I love you. I am leaving. Few resignation letters have ever had a better melody. The song reached number one on the country chart in 1974. Parton’s rerecording for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas returned it to number one on the country chart in 1982. Then Whitney Houston turned it into a global pop phenomenon in 1992. Three eras. Two extraordinary singers. One song. Dolly wrote it. That distinction matters. The Problem With Choosing Dolly Parton Songs Trying to explain Dolly Parton through five or six songs is almost hopeless. The breadth of the music fights you. Her enormous catalog stretches across country, bluegrass, gospel, folk, pop and rock. There are murder ballads and love songs, songs about poverty and sex, mothers and children, ambition and jealousy, God and heartbreak. There are songs that sound as though they might have been carried across the Atlantic two hundred years ago and songs built for American pop radio. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7BVkV6Y7bRYFAOEZxU5hGi?si=t6j9cWyQQZCZhYiC7Iwj0g&utm_source=copy-link&pi=DP9j4_f0T5OVM Choosing only a handful inevitably leaves another Dolly Parton outside the room. So the familiar titles are better understood as doors into the catalog rather than the catalog itself. “Coat of Many Colors” may be the purest expression of the Parton method. The story is tiny. Her mother sews a coat from scraps. Young Dolly proudly wears it to school. Other children laugh because the family is poor. That is essentially the entire plot. Yet Parton transforms the memory into something much larger, a song about poverty without self pity and about dignity without preaching. The coat has almost no monetary value and immeasurable emotional value. That contradiction is the song. Then there is “Jolene.” The arrangement is spare and nervous. The narrator does not threaten the other woman. She practically kneels before her. That is what makes the song unsettling. Dolly’s narrator understands Jolene’s beauty and acknowledges her own vulnerability. It is jealousy stripped of swagger. “9 to 5” belongs to another Dolly entirely. Written for the 1980 film in which Parton starred alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, it converted office frustration into an impossibly cheerful pop country record. Parton famously used her acrylic fingernails to imitate the clatter of a typewriter while developing the song’s rhythm. It became a number one country and pop hit. Then there are the songs that complicate the cheerful public image. “Down from Dover” is brutal. “Joshua” is strange, funny and tender. “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” sounds like emotional liberation set to music. “My Tennessee Mountain Home” is practically a personal geography. “The Grass Is Blue” helped announce her late career return to bluegrass and acoustic music. “Here You Come Again,” written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil rather than Parton, demonstrated how naturally her voice could inhabit sophisticated pop songwriting. And “Islands in the Stream,” written by the Bee Gees and recorded with Kenny Rogers, became one of the great country pop duets of the 1980s. This is why compiling a neat Dolly Parton starter kit is frustrating. Every song you include pushes another important part of her career outside the frame. Dolly, Emmylou and Linda If Dolly’s commercial crossover records demonstrated how far she could travel from the mountains, her work with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris demonstrated how easily she could find her way home. The three women had wanted to record together for years. When Trio finally appeared in 1987, the result felt less like a superstar project than three remarkable voices gathering around an old kitchen table. The harmonies were exquisite. More importantly, they were connected to a much older American musical language: country, folk, gospel and mountain harmony singing. Trio became a major commercial success and won the Grammy Award for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The three reunited for Trio II, released in 1999, which also won a Grammy. Listen closely and the celebrity disappears. What remains are voices. That may be one of the secrets to Parton’s longevity. She spent her career building an enormous persona while possessing enough musical confidence to step inside a harmony and become part of something larger than herself. The Woman and the Costume Dolly understood something about celebrity long before celebrity became a twenty four hour industry. If the public wants a character, give them one. Then keep the important parts for yourself. The enormous hair, impossible clothes and exaggerated glamour became a kind of armor. Dolly joked about the artificiality for decades. She got to make the joke first, which meant nobody else could use it against her quite as effectively. Behind that character was a remarkably private marriage. Parton met Carl Dean outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat shortly after arriving in Nashville in 1964. They married in 1966. Dean wanted virtually nothing to do with celebrity life. He rarely appeared publicly with his wife and became almost mythical to generations of Dolly fans. Their marriage lasted nearly fifty nine years. Carl Dean died on March 3, 2025, at the age of eighty two. For a woman who shared so much of herself with the world, the marriage represented something she largely refused to surrender to it. That boundary may have helped preserve both the marriage and Dolly herself. Building Something Back Home Success took Dolly Parton around the world. Money brought her back to East Tennessee. In 1986, Parton entered into a partnership with the Herschend family and became associated with their existing Pigeon Forge theme park, which was renamed Dollywood. It is therefore not quite accurate to say that Dolly simply founded the park herself. What she did was arguably more interesting. She attached one of the most valuable names in entertainment to a major economic bet on her home region. Dollywood grew into one of Tennessee’s largest tourism attractions and a major regional employer. Parton’s investment in the Smoky Mountains became part business, part cultural preservation and part homecoming. The same instinct appears even more clearly in the Imagination Library. Parton launched the program in 1995 in Sevier County. The inspiration was intensely personal. Her father could not read or write. The idea was wonderfully uncomplicated. Send books to children. Not deserving children. Not children who passed a test. Children. Registered children receive age appropriate books from birth until age five at no cost to their families. The program eventually expanded far beyond Tennessee and into several countries, placing hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children. It may ultimately become as important to understanding Dolly Parton as “Jolene.” Dolly and the American Argument Parton occupied a peculiar position in American culture. Everybody seemed to want her on their side. She usually refused the invitation. She generally avoided endorsing political candidates and repeatedly resisted being turned into a conventional partisan celebrity. That should never have been mistaken for an absence of values. Her values were usually expressed through action rather than party affiliation. After the devastating 2016 wildfires in East Tennessee, the Dollywood Foundation established the My People Fund to provide direct financial assistance to families whose primary residences had been destroyed. In 2020, Parton donated one million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for coronavirus research. Vanderbilt’s research included work connected with the development of the Moderna COVID 19 vaccine. It is more precise to say that her donation supported Vanderbilt’s broader coronavirus research effort rather than claiming Dolly personally financed the vaccine. She also publicly supported gay people and same sex marriage despite having emerged from a conservative, religious Appalachian culture and working for decades within country music. She managed these positions without presenting herself as morally superior to the people who disagreed with her. That is an increasingly rare American skill. Dolly’s politics, if they can even be called politics, generally began with individual human beings rather than ideological categories. Feed somebody. Give a family money after their house burns down. Send a child a book. Then get back to work. Why Young People Kept Finding Dolly Perhaps the most remarkable chapter in the Dolly Parton story is the one that should not have happened. She did not become an oldies act. Artists survive for decades. Far fewer remain culturally alive. There is a difference. Young listeners who discovered Dolly Parton through Miley Cyrus, Whitney Houston, Beyonce, TikTok, a movie soundtrack or a parent’s record collection did not necessarily treat her as a museum piece from the age of Porter Wagoner. They found somebody surprisingly contemporary. Parton’s relationship with Miley Cyrus became the most obvious bridge. Dolly was Cyrus’s godmother, and their relationship developed publicly across television appearances, performances and recordings. They recorded “Rainbowland” together for Cyrus’s 2017 album Younger Now and continued to perform together. It never felt like an aging star desperately seeking relevance from somebody younger. It felt like family. Dolly’s 2023 rock album Rockstar made the generational strategy even more explicit. After her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she did not merely defend her right to be there. She treated the occasion as an excuse to wander into somebody else’s neighborhood. The sprawling project brought her together with artists from different generations and genres, including Miley Cyrus, Pink, Brandi Carlile, Lizzo, Chris Stapleton, Stevie Nicks, Debbie Harry, Elton John, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. She did not ask younger musicians to come worship at the shrine. She went to work with them. That distinction helps explain why the affection was reciprocal. Beyonce provided another striking example in 2024. On Cowboy Carter, Beyonce reimagined “Jolene,” with Parton herself appearing on the album. A song written by an Appalachian country singer in the early 1970s suddenly became part of a twenty first century conversation about country music, race, ownership, genre and American identity. The song survived because the emotional machinery underneath it still worked. That was Dolly’s great advantage with younger generations. The hair may have belonged to another age. The emotions did not. Jealousy does not become obsolete. Neither does poverty. Neither does wanting to escape the place where you were born while still loving it desperately. Neither does wondering whether success will change you. Neither does leaving someone you love because staying would mean surrendering yourself. Young audiences recognized those things immediately. There was another reason they trusted her. Dolly Parton understood the difference between taking the work seriously and taking herself seriously. She was willing to be ridiculous. She was also almost impossible to embarrass because she had already incorporated the joke into the character. She built herself into a cartoon so successfully that the cartoon became bulletproof. For younger artists living in an era of meticulously managed authenticity, that could feel strangely liberating. Dolly made no claim to visual authenticity whatsoever. The hair was exaggerated. The clothes were exaggerated. The figure was exaggerated. The accent could be played with. The jokes were rehearsed. And somehow the woman underneath all of it felt genuine. That paradox may have been her greatest creation. The Long Road Home Dolly Parton left East Tennessee because she wanted something enormous. She got it. She became a country star, pop star, movie star, songwriter, producer, entrepreneur, philanthropist and cultural institution. But the remarkable thing is how little distance there ultimately seemed to be between the woman at the center of that empire and the girl who left Sevier County for Nashville in 1964. The mountains kept following her. They are there in the tremble of her voice. They are there in “Coat of Many Colors.” They are there in the old harmonies of Trio. They are there in Dollywood. They are there every time another Imagination Library book arrives at the home of a child whose parents might not otherwise have bought one. And they are there when a singer young enough to be Dolly’s granddaughter discovers “Jolene” and realizes that the woman with the rhinestones understood fear, desire and insecurity just as well as anybody writing songs today. That may have been the final trick. Dolly Parton spent her entire career making herself larger than life while writing songs about people who felt small. The poor girl. The jealous woman. The exhausted secretary. The abandoned lover. The homesick traveler. The woman who loves somebody enough to leave. That is why her music is so difficult to reduce to a handful of songs. There are simply too many Dollys in there. And perhaps that is why generation after generation kept discovering her. They were not merely inheriting their parents’ Dolly Parton. They kept finding their own. Rest easy, Dolly. The mountains still carry your songs. The children still turn the pages you gave them. And somewhere, a young musician is discovering “Jolene” for the first time. Legends leave us. Their echoes do not. Your voice is woven into the American songbook now, carried in harmonies, stories and memories that will long outlive any stage that held you. The girl from the Tennessee mountains made it all the way around the world. And somehow, she never really left home. Rest easy, Legend. Your legacy will endure.

The salt air off the Tagus hits you first, heavy with the weight of the Atlantic and centuries of ships that went looking for the edge of the world. In the outdoor cafes of Cascais and along the steep, cobblestone hills of Lisbon, you hear American voices over the espresso machines. They talk about the light, the safety, the wine, and the slow, forgiving pace of life. They believe they have discovered something fresh. They think they are the pioneers of a brand-new migration route. They are wrong. They are merely the latest wave in a long, quiet conversation between two shores that began when their own country was nothing more than a dangerous idea. To understand why thousands of Americans are packing up their lives and moving to Portugal today, you have to look past the real estate listings and turn back to 1776. The historical record is far subtle than a simple story of an old kingdom coming to the aid of a young republic. It is a story written in trade routes, geography, and the stubborn realities of survival. When the thirteen American colonies declared their independence, Portugal was caught in an impossible vice. Governed by King Jose I and his formidable minister, the Marquis of Pombal, the Portuguese Crown had little interest in encouraging subjects to overthrow a monarch. Furthermore, Britain was Portugal's oldest military ally, bound by treaties that stretched back to the Middle Ages. So, on July 4, 1776, Lisbon did what any prudent monarchy would do. It issued a royal decree closing all Portuguese ports to American vessels. Yet, geography has a way of mocking politics. Portugal was an Atlantic nation, and Atlantic nations depend on trade. Long before the revolution, New England merchants had forged a lucrative commerce with Lisbon and the Atlantic archipelagos. Americans wanted Portuguese salt, fruit, and the rich, fortified wine of Madeira. Portugal needed North American timber, dried cod, and grain. When the war broke out, the political hostility of Lisbon could not entirely erase the simple fact that both sides needed what the other had. As historian Timothy Walker points out, Portuguese policy was pulled in three directions at once: the massive profits of North American commerce, an ideological dread of republican rebellion, and the vital necessity of keeping London happy. It was a high-stakes balancing act. While official decrees banned the American flag, ships continually found ways to trade through the shadows of the Azores and Madeira. When Queen Maria I took the throne and Pombal fell from grace, the balance tipped. Portugal moved toward a quiet, strategic neutrality. Then came the ultimate pragmatic gamble. On February 15, 1783, Portugal issued a royal decree recognizing the independence of the United States and reopening its ports to American ships. The timing of that decree is breathtaking. It was signed more than six months before Great Britain itself signed the definitive Treaty of Paris. Britain's oldest ally had quietly decided that the American republic was going to endure, and that Atlantic commerce mattered more than monarchical solidarity. From that moment on, the founding generation of American statesmen paid close attention to Portugal. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams personally negotiated with Portuguese diplomats in Paris, attempting to draft a formal treaty of amity and commerce. They recognized that Portugal was a crucial gateway for American agriculture. George Washington understood it too. In June 1790, little more than a year into his presidency, Washington appointed John Marsden Pintard as the American consul to Madeira. It was only the second consular appointment made under the new United States Constitution. Long before modern retirees were buying whitewashed villas in the Madeiran hills, Washington's government was putting men on the ground to protect American merchants trading in Madeira wine. The connection was not merely economic; it was intellectual. Benjamin Franklin, the ultimate symbol of the American Enlightenment, was elected as a corresponding member of Lisbon's Royal Academy of Sciences in 1782. When Franklin died in 1790, the Portuguese scholar Abbe Jose Correia da Serra delivered a grand commemorative address in Lisbon on the Fourth of July. In the halls of Portuguese academia, the American experiment was being studied and respected. As the nineteenth and twentieth centuries unfolded, the human current across this corridor shifted almost entirely in one direction: from east to west. Driven by economic hardship, volcanic eruptions, and political instability, waves of Portuguese migrants left the mainland, the Azores, and Madeira. They crossed the Atlantic to build lives in the textile mills of New Bedford, the fishing fleets of Monterey, and the sugarcane fields of Hawaii. The American consulate in Ponta Delgada, established in the 1790s, became a vital conduit for this migration, growing into the oldest continuously operating United States consulate in the world. Generations of Portuguese families planted deep roots in American soil, creating vibrant communities that stretched from New Jersey to California. Now, in our own century, the Atlantic has turned once again. The migration has reversed. Americans seeking refuge from the relentless velocity, political friction, and inflated costs of modern domestic life are setting sail for the Iberian peninsula. They bring their remote jobs, their capital, and their families to the very shores their ancestors traded with. Historian Tiago Moreira de Sá describes the relationship between Portugal and the United States as a series of repeating cycles of separation, reconnection, and Atlantic unity. The modern American presence in Lisbon, Porto, and the Algarve is not an anomaly. It is simply the latest turn of that ancient wheel. When an American stands on the cliffs of Cabo da Roca, looking out over the churning blue expanse toward the west, they are not standing in a foreign land that suddenly caught the fancy of internet nomads. They are standing at the eastern terminal of a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old bridge. The goods and the passengers have changed, but the ocean remains the same. The Atlantic, which appears to divide us, has always been the very thing that brings us home.

1. Frank Beard, ZZ Top Drummer, Dies at 77 Frank Beard, the drummer whose Texas shuffle anchored ZZ Top for more than five decades, died at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, while receiving hospice care. Beard performed on every ZZ Top studio album and helped the blues-rooted Texas trio sell more than 50 million records. Billy Gibbons said the band intends to continue performing in line with Beard's wishes. Source: Associated Press 2. Indigenous Musicians Organize Canadian Forest Fire Benefit Twenty-five Indigenous musicians will perform at the Mikinakoos Forest Fire Relief Show in Toronto on August 29. Jeremy Dutcher, Aysanabee, Julian Taylor, Logan Staats, Mimi O'Bonsawin and Adrian Sutherland are among the artists raising funds for the Mikinakoos Children's Fund. The fund supports First Nations children in northern Ontario communities affected by wildfire evacuations. Source: Roots Music Canada 3. Community Support Rescues Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival Two months after its future appeared uncertain, the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival staged a free 49 and a half edition with support from the provincial government, the City of St. John's and the local community. More than 2,500 people attended the event and contributed more than 17,000 dollars in donations. The support gives organizers a foundation from which to rebuild toward the festival's fiftieth edition in 2027. Source: Roots Music Canada 4. Traditional Music Takes Over Five Dublin Neighborhoods The Dublin City Fleadh returned on August 22 and 23 as a free traditional music celebration spread across Smithfield Square, Meeting House Square, Wolfe Tone Square, Parliament Street and Capel Street. Altan, Dervish, the Sharon Shannon Big Band, Andy Irvine, Kila and The Scratch led a programme of concerts, ceilis, piping, harp recitals, workshops and informal street sessions. Source: Dublin City Council 5. Irish Harpmaking Presented as a Living Heritage Craft Harps for Heritage: Macalla na Mara brought musicians and instrument makers together at Muckross Traditional Farms in County Kerry. The programme included performances by Lisa Lambe, Cormac De Barra, Deirdre Granville and Aoife Granville. Master harpmaker Tim O'Carroll also demonstrated the woodworking techniques behind handcrafted Irish harps and discussed efforts to protect and continue the tradition. Source: National Heritage Week 6. The Long Road Prepares Major Americana Lineup The Long Road Festival announced a transatlantic lineup for its August 27 to 30 event at Stanford Hall in Leicestershire. Emmylou Harris, Maren Morris and Steve Earle headline a programme that combines prominent American and Canadian artists with British roots performers. The festival continues to establish itself as an important European gathering point for country, folk and Americana music. Source: Americana UK 7. Kate Miller-Heidke Explores Australian Gothic Folk Kate Miller-Heidke released her sixth studio album, The Kiss and the Abyss, combining gothic folk, baroque pop and medieval imagery. The Australian awarded the album four and a half stars and described it as potentially her strongest work. The review highlighted its theatrical arrangements, existential anxiety and dark humour. Source: The Australian 8. Brandon Flowers Leaves Las Vegas for Nashville Brandon Flowers released Thrasher, his first solo album in eleven years and his most direct engagement with country and Western music. Recorded at Nashville's RCA Studio A, the album features collaboration with David Rawlings, pedal steel guitarist Bruce Bouton and harmonica player Charlie McCoy. The record draws on Flowers' small town Utah upbringing and the Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash albums favoured by his father. Source: NME 9. Keb' Mo' Turns Personal Upheaval Into The Breakdown Keb' Mo' released the ten song album The Breakdown, recorded at his home studio outside Nashville after open heart surgery and the end of his long marriage. The record channels those experiences through his established blend of acoustic blues, Americana and conversational songwriting. Its central themes are recovery, endurance and moving forward. Source: WBGO 10. Grace Potter Returns With Trespasser Grace Potter released her seventh studio album, Trespasser, through Thirty Tigers. The release was accompanied by a video for Mainstreet U.S.A. The lead single, Love Me Not, had reached the Americana radio top five by the album's release date. Potter also confirmed the September return of her Grand Point North festival in Burlington, Vermont. Source: Official release announcement 11. Ian Munsick Builds a Modern Western Mythology Ian Munsick's fourth album, The Mountain Goat, uses Wyoming landscapes, horses, family stories and cowboy identity as central themes rather than decorative country music imagery. The album is grounded in traditional fiddle, banjo, pedal steel and acoustic instrumentation, while also incorporating psychedelic textures, flamenco influences and contemporary production. It presents the American West as a living cultural environment rather than a nostalgic costume. Source: Entertainment Focus 12. Ken Pomeroy Records the Songs That Formed Her Musical Identity Cherokee singer-songwriter Ken Pomeroy released Tonight's News, a six song collection recorded live in one day at Wilco's Chicago studio, the Loft. The musicians recorded together in a circle without overdubs. Pomeroy reinterprets songs that shaped her musical identity, including Gillian Welch's Look at Miss Ohio, Woody Guthrie's Deportee and John Denver's This Old Guitar. Source: Rounder Records 13. Mike Bern Examines Inherited Trauma Through Wolastoqey Songwriting Tobique First Nation singer-songwriter Mike Bern released The Belt, a song written from the perspective of a child trying to understand a father changed by war. Produced by Mathieu LeGuerrier, the song explores discipline, silence and intergenerational pain. It avoids reducing the father to a simple villain or hero, instead treating the subject with emotional complexity. Source: Roots Music Canada 14. Warren Haynes Gives Southern Rock and Jam Music an Orchestral Frame Warren Haynes will release Dreams and Songs: A Symphonic Journey on September 18. The album documents his 2019 performance with the 64 piece Asheville Symphony Orchestra. The programme reimagines music associated with Gov't Mule, the Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead. Songs include Whipping Post, Shakedown Street and Terrapin Station. Don Was served as co-producer. Source: American Blues Scene 15. Steep Canyon Rangers Return to Hard Driving Bluegrass Steep Canyon Rangers released Babylon Stone from their current album, Next Act. Written by banjoist Graham Sharp, the arrangement rotates lead vocals between Aaron Burdett and Barrett Smith. It uses tempo shifts, key changes, banjo, fiddle, mandolin and resonator guitar to foreground the band's traditional bluegrass strengths. Source: Bluegrass Today

There is a way to misunderstand Les Hay Babies. You hear the banjo on their early records. You hear the three voices singing together. You hear country phrases and English words slipping into French sentences. It is easy to say they are three French Canadians playing at American folk music. That is wrong. The reality works the other way around. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2p9a81OhZh3FSXmgOzcuPy?si=bsOAwCZ2SuGdSGYYGdu6og&utm_source=copy-link&pi=sK9Ya_K3RDCaH Julie Aube, Katrine Noel, and Vivianne Roy come from New Brunswick. They are Acadians. In that part of the world, French and English have lived together for a long time. So have country music, old dances, and American songs. The women do not separate language from place. They sing in French, in English, and in Chiac. They do not fix their French to sound proper. They do not switch to English to sell more records. That is why they belong in the conversation about Americana. The three women met in November 2011 at a music contest in New Brunswick. They grew up in different villages—Memramcook, Petit-Rocher, and Rogersville. They spoke with different accents. When they started, Aube played the banjo, Noel played the ukulele, and Roy played the guitar. They called themselves Les Hay Babies. In 2013, they won the Francouvertes in Montreal. They sang three-part harmonies that fit together cleanly. Noel sang with a country edge, Roy sang rough and low, and Aube sang between them. Chiac is the way people talk in southeastern New Brunswick. It mixes French syntax with English words. The band writes with the words they use at home. A song named Mon Homesick Heart tells you what they are doing. Another called Baby viendra back a genoux does the same. If an Appalachian singer gets to use his local speech, an Acadian singer should get to use hers. They started with acoustic instruments because they were young and had a small car. The banjo, ukulele, and guitar fit in the trunk. That was their early sound on Folio in 2012 and Mon Homesick Heart in 2014. By 2016, on La 4ieme dimension, they plugged in. They played electric guitars, turned up the drums, and played rock and roll. On Boite aux lettres in 2020, they wrote songs based on old letters written by a young woman who had moved to Montreal. Country music has always been full of people leaving home and writing letters back. They were doing what roots musicians have always done. In the spring of 2023, they went to Louisiana. They stayed near Erath in Vermilion Parish. They drank in local bars, listened to jukeboxes, and talked to the people. Centuries ago, the Acadians were driven out of Canada, and many went to Louisiana to become Cajuns. The women felt at home there. They did not make a traditional Cajun record with fiddles and accordions. Instead, they took the energy of Louisiana and brought it back north. In October 2024, they released Tintamarre. They recorded it in Tantramar, New Brunswick, with electric guitars, slide guitar, and drums. The track Soyez fiers speaks about family, land, and pride. The track Entre le chien et le loup describes stepping into a southern bar and finding strangers who speak a language like your own. They won awards for the record in 2025 and kept touring through 2026. Aube released a solo album called Rurale in May 2026, working with a musician from Lafayette. The connection to the South remained. Americana is not just an American passport. It is a way of living and singing. It is about small towns, hard work, leaving, returning, and speaking the way you speak. Les Hay Babies do not sound like outsiders trying to play American music. They sound like proof that the French language was part of the story from the beginning.

There is a story people tell about two brothers in Japan, just after the war, who wanted to play American music and could not afford the instruments to play it on. So they made one. They took a cigar box and strung it with shamisen strings and taught themselves that way. Their mother, watching this, eventually sold one of her kimonos to buy them proper guitars. That is where you have to begin. Not with a festival or a famous band, but with a sold kimono and a boy plucking a cigar box in a country that had just lost everything. The brothers were Yasushi and Hisashi Ozaki. Their father had lived in the United States and brought the old songs home with him. What the Ozakis did with those songs would still be going on seventy years later, which is a long time for anything to go on, let alone a music imported from the hollows of Kentucky by people who had never seen a mountain in Appalachia. The thing you learn, if you follow this story to the end, is that it is not the story you expect. It is not the story of how a foreign country fell for a quaint American folk music. It is the story of how a country took that music, learned it cold, met the men who made it, changed it, and then sent it back across the ocean improved. It is a bigger story than a curiosity. It is closer to a republic. The music arrives by radio After 1945 the American occupation brought its music with it, and most of it came in over a single radio network. In September of that year, barely a month after the surrender, the American forces switched on the Far East Network. The flagship was a Tokyo station called WVTR, broadcasting at first out of the NHK building, which was the very heart of Japanese radio, a small irony worth pausing on. Its job was to keep the occupation troops entertained, and a great many of those troops were farm boys and Southerners who wanted the country and hillbilly and western songs of home. So that is what WVTR gave them. And the Japanese, who were never the intended audience, simply tuned in. In a country where an imported record cost a small fortune, the radio was free. Two of the country shows mattered more than the rest. One was Chuck Wagon Time, an hour of hillbilly and country out of Tokyo that by the late 1940s was playing Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams and Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, with a sister station down in Osaka doing much the same. It lit the fuse under the whole early Japanese cowboy-band craze. Young men learned the songs off it, phonetically, and then named their bands after it. One of the first Japanese country groups called itself the Chuck Wagon Boys, straight off the dial. The other was Honshu Hayride, named for the main island, which ran on Saturdays and, unlike the record shows, put live musicians on the air. The house band for a time was a group of American servicemen called the Drifters, led by a rhythm guitarist named Chuck Berry. Not that Chuck Berry. A different one, a soldier, who has been quietly confusing people ever since. The band had a steel guitar and a singer and, now and then, Japanese players sitting in, some of them refugees from the Chuck Wagon Boys. So a young picker in Tokyo could do more than hear this music. He could hear it played live, and he could imagine himself into it. Almost none of this is well documented, which is part of its charm. There are no tidy broadcast logs, no neat lists of who hosted what and when. What survives is the effect. The shows are remembered less for their details than for the bands they hatched, the way you remember a match less than the fire. And he could not afford the record. That part is important. Toru Mitsui, who later became both a picker and a serious scholar of this music, once worked out that a single imported LP in the late 1950s could cost about a fifth of what a college graduate earned in his first month of work. Think about that. A fifth of a month’s pay for one record. So records were not bought casually. They were borrowed and traded and taped and studied like sacred texts. Men learned Earl Scruggs banjo rolls and Bill Monroe’s mandolin from sound alone, note by note, reconstructing from the air what they could not hold in their hands. By 1947 there were already Japanese groups like the Western Ramblers playing American hillbilly songs, singing the English lyrics phonetically, sound by sound, without always knowing what the words meant. The high lonesome sound, sung by a man who did not speak the language, came out strange and a little haunted. It worked anyway. The first band, and the first record In 1957 the Ozaki brothers formed the East Mountain Boys. They had a man named Tatsuo Arita to thank for pointing them the right way. Arita understood what a real bluegrass band was supposed to sound like, and he pushed them toward it, banjo and all. He is not famous. He belongs in the story anyway, because someone always has to be the one who knows what the thing should be before it exists. In January 1958 Columbia Japan put out the East Mountain Boys playing “Jimmy Brown, the News Boy” backed with “Blue Ridge Cabin Home.” That is about as early a piece of Japanese bluegrass as exists on a record. They played the American Cultural Center in Osaka and the enormous Western Carnival in Tokyo in 1959. Decades later, in 2013, the International Bluegrass Music Association gave them a Distinguished Achievement Award, which is a fine thing, though one suspects the sold kimono was the real award. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5B4fzdGq9rhdBiAL8vMbW3?si=KmegPpwcQaquOy87-G2E1Q&utm_source=copy-link&pi=mgiUREs1RiirO They go to Nashville almost immediately Here is the part that surprises people. The Japanese did not stay home admiring the records. They got on airplanes. Yoshio Ono was a yodeler and banjo player who signed with Nippon Columbia in 1957. On May 7, 1960, he stood on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry with Flatt and Scruggs and sang and yodeled “Columbus Stockade Blues.” Billboard wrote it up and noted that he had met Earl Scruggs. He appears to have been the first Japanese performer ever to play the Opry. He had come a very long way to do it. Then there was Michio Higashi, who at nineteen led a college band called the Ozark Mountaineers. In 1961 he traveled the United States, spent time in Nashville, watched the Americans play up close, and got himself onto the Opry stage, where he borrowed a capo from Earl Scruggs. You could not invent a more perfect detail if you tried. He had learned Scruggs off the radio, taping the broadcasts and playing them over and over until his fingers found the notes, and now here was Scruggs, handing him a capo. The circle closed in about a decade. The universities take over By the 1960s the engine of all this had become the universities, and this is where Japan went in a direction America never did. In Appalachia bluegrass lived on porches and in churches. In Japan it lived in college clubs, the sakuru, structured and disciplined, with practice routines and note-for-note transcription of Flatt and Scruggs and Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. College bands competed in national contests broadcast to the whole country, where bluegrass sat right alongside jazz and Latin and pop, and sometimes won. One band that won was the Bluegrass Ramblers, who took the 1965 Battle of the College Bands national championship. Their victory told younger musicians something useful, which was that this music was not a museum piece. It could win. Among those younger musicians were two brothers named Josh and Akira Otsuka, and everything now begins to point toward them, and toward a coffee house in Kobe. Lost City In 1966 a man named Kenji Nozaki opened a coffee house in Kobe and called it Lost City. He modeled it partly on the American folk coffee houses, and its whole idea was that you did not come to watch. You came to play. You brought your instrument and you jammed. If you ever make a map of this music, put a large marker on Kobe. Through Lost City passed Josh Otsuka and Akira Otsuka and Saburo Watanabe and Toshio Watanabe and a fiddler named Ryo Liao and a guitarist named Chien-Hua Lee and a young man named Shoji Tabuchi, who would later cross the ocean and build a whole entertainment career in America. The friendships made in that room produced the most important band Japan ever sent out. Bluegrass 45 They formed in Kobe in 1967 and called themselves Bluegrass 45. The classic lineup was Josh Otsuka on guitar and lead vocals, his brother Akira on mandolin, Sab Watanabe on banjo, Toshio Watanabe on bass, Ryo Liao on fiddle, and Chien-Hua Lee on guitar. They had grown up on Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers and, above all, the Country Gentlemen. They knew this music down to the ground. But they were not copyists, and that matters. Their self-produced 1970 album, Run Mountain, included a bluegrass arrangement of “Take Five,” the Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond jazz tune in five-four time, which is not a thing bluegrass bands did, or do. It was a small signal of a large idea. These men intended to do something with the music, not just preserve it under glass. In June 1971 they arrived in America for a fourteen-week tour arranged by Dick Freeland of Rebel Records. Bluegrass Unlimited later told the whole journey in a sixteen-part series, which tells you how much of an event it was. They traveled through the American bluegrass heartland and met, in the flesh, the musicians they had known only as grooves in vinyl. At Bean Blossom the reporters marveled at how much these Japanese kids knew, and watched them jam with Bill Monroe himself. They reached the Grand Ole Opry and played it. And they turned up in the 1971 festival film Bluegrass Country Soul, in a cast that included Earl Scruggs and Ralph Stanley and the Osborne Brothers and J.D. Crowe and a young Tony Rice and Del McCoury. The Americans did not treat them as a novelty act. They took the playing seriously, because the playing was serious. That is the whole point. Akira and the Country Gentleman Akira Otsuka’s mandolin hero was John Duffey of the Country Gentlemen. When Bluegrass 45 got to America, Duffey more or less took the young man under his wing. Akira went to watch the new band Duffey was starting, the Seldom Scene, again and again, and sometimes he stepped up and played with them. It stopped being a case of a Japanese musician admiring America. It became a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives. Years later, Akira produced a Smithsonian Folkways tribute to Duffey. The records had crossed the Pacific first. Then the man did. Making it Japanese The most interesting thing Bluegrass 45 did was quieter than the tour. They started putting Japanese songs into the music. They recorded pieces called “Kiso” and “Hana,” the second built on a well-known melody by the Japanese composer Rentaro Taki. They ran bluegrass instruments through jazz. They wrote their own material. Line it up and you can see the whole arc of the thing. First you copy the American records. Then you master the idiom. Then you cross the ocean and meet the people who made it. Then you change the songs. Then you fold in your own country’s music. That is not imitation. That is a culture taking something in and making it its own, which is the only real way anything foreign ever survives. The other road There was a second road running alongside the first. In 1971 the singer Tomoya Takaishi formed a group called Takaishi Tomoya and the Natasha Seven. They used the banjo and the folk-bluegrass sound but translated and reshaped the songs for a Japanese audience, and they got real radio play. Their records and instructional booklets pulled high school and college kids toward the music by the thousands. So there were two branches now growing from the same trunk. There was the hardcore bluegrass scene, and there was the popular folk boom that borrowed its tools. Both fed the same tree. The man who built the machine After the touring years Bluegrass 45 dispersed, and it would be easy to end the story there. That would be a mistake, because the dispersal is when the real construction started. The man who did the most was Sab Watanabe, the banjo player. Sab and his brother Toshio built, around this music, an entire national infrastructure. They founded B.O.M. Services to distribute records and instruments. They started Red Clay Records. In 1972 they launched the Takarazuka Bluegrass Festival, which is now described as the third-oldest continuously running bluegrass festival anywhere on earth. In 1983 they started Moonshiner, a monthly Japanese-language bluegrass magazine that is still coming out. Stop and count what that adds up to. Records. Journalism. Distribution. Concert promotion. Festivals. Clubs. Instrument dealers. University clubs feeding the whole thing. Japan did not import a music. It built, from scratch, every organ a living musical culture needs to keep itself alive without help. And the influence ran backward. Through Red Clay, Sab had a hand in Tony Rice’s first solo album, issued in Japan in 1973, the record later known simply as Guitar. Read that again. A Japanese bluegrass entrepreneur helped bring the debut of one of the most important American acoustic guitarists of the century into the world. The usual direction of cultural traffic simply reversed. Sab Watanabe Inoue died on November 22, 2019, at sixty-nine, after three years of cancer. He had played banjo in Bluegrass 45 for fifty-three years and published Moonshiner for thirty-seven. Two months before he died, the magazine won a Distinguished Achievement Award from the IBMA. He built the house that Japanese bluegrass still lives in. The traffic runs both ways By the 1970s Japan had become a serious market, and the American stars came. J.D. Crowe remembered playing eight shows on a 1975 Japanese tour and selling out every one. Jerry Douglas remembered how intense the Japanese crowds were. Musicians traveling with Vassar Clements remembered fans waiting for them at the airport. Bill Monroe came. Flatt and Scruggs, Ralph Stanley, Country Gazette, all of them built followings in Japan. The highway that had run one way, from Kentucky to Kobe by radio, now ran in both directions at once. Bluegrass was not the only thing on the radio It is worth stepping back here to see the whole thing. That radio pouring Honshu Hayride into Japanese homes was pouring in a great deal else besides. The same Far East Network, the same base clubs, the same unaffordable imported records, the same young men learning by ear were bringing in jazz and rock and roll and the blues at exactly the same time. Bluegrass was not a lonely accident. It was one stream in a flood. Jazz had the deepest roots. It had been in Japan since the 1920s, then was banned during the war as enemy music, then came roaring back after 1945. Japanese players found steady work in the base clubs entertaining American troops, and they studied the records for hours in the jazz kissa, the listening coffee houses built around an expensive hi-fi and a wall of LPs, which was doing for jazz almost exactly what Lost City would later do for bluegrass. The early playing was copying, swing and then bebop. But the copyists turned into masters. The pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi was discovered by Oscar Peterson in 1953 and went on to write jazz that folded in Japanese harmony and form. The saxophonist Sadao Watanabe went to Berklee and came home to build a scene. By the 1970s Japan was one of the largest jazz markets on earth. Rock and roll came in harder and frightened people more. The rockabilly boom of 1958 centered on the Nichigeki Western Carnival in Tokyo, the very stage the East Mountain Boys would play, and it produced screaming teenagers and pompadours and a full-blown moral panic. Authorities and parents and newspapers tied the music to delinquency and loose morals and the erosion of the old ways. Some stations and towns banned it. Schools punished the kids who went. Then came the surf-guitar eleki craze, and after the Beatles played Budokan in 1966 the Group Sounds bands, and then Happy End and the others who insisted on singing in Japanese about Japanese things, which was the real turning point, the moment the borrowed music became the country’s own. The blues arrived thin and late, mostly in the 1970s, and settled first in Kansai, in Osaka and Kyoto, where bands like the West Road Blues Band built a small devoted scene and argued, as everyone eventually argued, over whether men who were neither American nor Black could truly play this music at all. What the Japanese players tended to prize was the very thing their own social world discouraged, the raw and unguarded feeling, the sound of a man saying plainly how bad he felt. Line those up beside the bluegrass story and the shape is the same every time. The music comes in on the occupation’s infrastructure. Japanese musicians master it by copying it note for note. They perform it first for Americans and then for their own people. They build the institutions, the clubs and labels and coffee houses and college circles and festivals. They begin singing in Japanese and writing their own songs. And the traffic turns two-way, with Japan becoming a market and a touring stop and, now and then, a place that improved on the thing it had been sent. So what sets bluegrass a little apart? Two things. It never became a mass craze, which spared it both the moral panics and the talent agencies, and let it stay small and serious and devoted, a craft rather than a fashion. And of all these musics, bluegrass may have built the most complete republic of the lot. A jazz player in Tokyo was one node in a vast international industry that already existed. The bluegrass people, working with a far smaller music, somehow built the entire apparatus themselves, the records and the magazine and the festivals and the instrument shops and the university clubs and the whole system of handing it down, a self-contained country with a population you could almost count by hand. That is the strange wonder of it. The smaller the music, the more of it Japan had to build from nothing, and so the more completely it became theirs. The craft You cannot talk about Japanese bluegrass without talking about the craft, because that is where the Japanese temperament met the music and something clicked. There is a phrase, shokunin kishitsu, the artisan spirit, and another, kata, mastery through exact form. Japanese pickers came at American traditional music the way a swordsmith comes at steel. They transcribed the classic breaks note for note. They studied the micro-timing. For a long time the rule was that you earned the right to improvise only after you had completely mastered the canon, which is a very Japanese idea and, when you hear the results, a defensible one. The rhythm sections play with a clean, driving, almost metronomic precision. The craft went into the instruments too. Japanese luthiers began building mandolins and guitars that could stand next to prewar Gibsons and Martins, and Japanese collectors became some of the most careful keepers of rare American instruments in the world, setting exacting standards for tone and setup. A country that could not afford a single LP in 1958 was, within a couple of generations, helping to define what the instruments themselves should sound like. The children inherit it And now the part that makes the whole thing feel like something more than nostalgia. The young players. Takumi Kodera came to bluegrass sideways, through punk and British rock and Bob Dylan and American folk, before he ever picked up a banjo. In 2018 he placed second in the Winfield banjo championship, which is one of the hardest banjo contests going, and a good measure of how far the playing had come. His heroes include Earl Scruggs, but also Bela Fleck and Alison Brown, the progressive ones. So here is the difference laid out plainly. In the 1950s a Japanese musician learned Scruggs from a borrowed record. Kodera can take in Scruggs and Fleck and Brown all at once and then decide what a Japanese banjo of the twenty-first century ought to sound like. Kazuhiro Inaba made bluegrass a full-time living, which few Japanese players have done. He sings and plays guitar and banjo and mandolin and fiddle, has put out seven solo albums, tours America and Canada, runs his own bluegrass camp, and brings American musicians to Japan. And his father was already interested in this music before him. That is the detail that matters most. Bluegrass in Japan is no longer something newly arrived from abroad. Japanese children are now inheriting it from Japanese parents. Then there is Takeharu Kunimoto, who may be the most remarkable of all of them. He was a professional performer of rokyoku, a Japanese narrative art, and he played the shamisen, the traditional three-stringed instrument. He worked out a way of playing the shamisen influenced by Scruggs-style banjo, went to study bluegrass at East Tennessee State University in 2003, and played in a bluegrass band there. That is Earl Scruggs coming back out of a shamisen. It is the cleanest example in the whole story of an American music being absorbed so completely that it returns through an instrument the Americans had never heard of. The bands keep forming. Blueside of Lonesome, built around the veteran Masuo Sasabe, has played Nashville’s Station Inn and appeared on Music City Roots. Bluegrass Police came together out of musicians meeting at Japan’s festivals, and in 2016 NPR held them up as proof that a scene already approaching sixty years old was still raising a new generation. There is even a group called Thompson the Fox, formed in 2016, that plays ragtime on xylophone, banjo, bass, and drums, which is not quite bluegrass but tells you where the acoustic roots tradition in Japan is wandering off to next. It is still growing The university clubs are still running. There are bluegrass circles at Hokkaido and Kobe and Kyoto and Nagoya and Tohoku and out on the Ryukyu Islands, among others. Josh Otsuka helped start bluegrass at Kobe as a student in the 1960s, and decades later a Kentucky public television crew filmed men from his generation playing alongside the current crop of Kobe students. That is roughly six unbroken decades of one club handing the music down. Japan now holds more than twenty bluegrass festivals a year. Takarazuka, founded in 1972, is still the anchor. And in March 2026 a brand-new one launched at Shuzenji, which is the detail that settles the question of whether this is a dying subculture. You do not start new festivals for a music that is fading. The infrastructure is still expanding, not just holding on. What it comes to Seventy years ago two brothers plucked a cigar box strung with shamisen strings because they could not afford a guitar, and their mother sold a kimono, and they learned an American mountain music off a radio because a record cost a fifth of a month’s wages. Out of that, a whole country built its own musicians and its own repertoire and its own heroes, its own record labels and magazines and clubs and festivals and teachers and a system for handing the whole thing down. The music flowed back the way it came. Bluegrass 45 played Bean Blossom and the Grand Ole Opry. Sab Watanabe helped release Tony Rice’s first record. Akira Otsuka became part of the Seldom Scene’s world. Japanese players filled in for American ones. American stars sold out Japanese halls. Students from the college circles turned professional and taught the next ones. And seventy years after the Ozaki brothers made an instrument out of a cigar box, Japanese university students are still sitting in a room in Kobe, picking banjos, passing it on. That is not an overseas curiosity. That is a republic, and it is still standing.