Americana’s Annual Conference Addresses Music’s Mission In Divisive Times

When Sheryl Crow received the BMI troubadour award on Sept.

14, she broke into tears as she revealed that her mother no longer recognizes her.

But, she added, when Crow sings something from the Great American Songbook, her mom perks up and sings every word.

Her reveal unwittingly set up some of what was to come when the annual AMERICANAFEST opened the next day in Nashville.

Between the songs and the personal stories of the genre’s artists, it tackled a bundle of difficult issues, including suicide, climate change, Hurricane Helene, wildfires, dementia, deportations, artificial intelligence and the loss of Dolly Parton .

No conclusions emerged, but the topics seemed less depressing than they might otherwise be, reflecting music’s power to inspire resilience, a trait that’s required for the artists to move forward.

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Some artists have had to learn resilience on the fly once they went professional; still others adapted it to their work after developing that trait in their personal lives.

One example came with artist-writer Amanda Shaw , who survived Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

“That’s something that has stuck with me — not just as an artist, but as a human being,” she said in the “Whose Roots? Expanding the Americana Music Narrative” panel.

“I think it has helped me so much in this industry because you can create something, you can do the best thing that you think you’ve ever done, but you cannot control the outcome at all.

But when you are authentic to who you are and what you do, there is nothing that can truly knock you down.” Americana, now more than 25 years into its journey, remains a somewhat nebulous catch-all format.

It grew originally as a bit of a country music subgenre, consisting of sounds that were influenced by country’s roots but were not connecting with what was then considered commercial country.

As it has evolved, Americana has embraced all sorts of roots music — blues, bluegrass, gospel, soul, rock, zydeco and rockabilly, for example.