Banding Together For Bluegrass

The grass is always greener someplace else, the old saying goes, but there is truly no better place to be than in Nashville during the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass. For years, this has been the top annual gathering of the tribes for bluegrass business folk and fans alike. The event’s move from Louisville to Nashville in 2005 allowed the IBMA Awards to take place at the Ryman Auditorium, where bluegrass music was fundamentally shaped if not invented by Bill Monroe’s band in the mid 1940s. This is the week one feels most connected by the common purpose of promoting and exposing this vital American music, a mission we at Roots are happy to pursue all year around.

Riches

I vividly remember discovering Kim Richey. It was 1995 and I was just starting to put it together in my brain that country music was way more diverse than “they” ever told us and that an entire movement was galvanizing around writers and artists who had nothing to do with the low-fat milky stuff that had taken over a radio format I’d once enjoyed. I was in the Tower Records in Manhattan (words to make a music fan cry) and one of the listening stations featured a kinky haired woman from Nashville who sounded like she’d been visited in turns by the muses of the Byrds, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne and Gail Davies. And there was that crystalline, emotion-laden voice. Sold. Fan for life.

The Fest Continues

I write from the middle of Americana music week, feeling surrounded by and totally immersed in amazing sounds, stories and all-around artistry. It began with this week’s Music City Roots, an official kick-off event for the Americana Music Association’s annual convention and festival, and it was an absolute blast, with Chuck Mead, Manda Mosher, Madison Violet, Corb Lund and the Steeldrivers. The next night we were treated probably the best Americana Honors & Awards show ever, with gobsmacking performances at the Ryman Auditorium by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Roseanne Cash, the Avett Brothers, Lucinda Williams, Joe Pug and many more, not to mention a 30-minute show closing set by Robert Plant and his Band of Joy.

Americana The Beautiful

There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘taking our country back,’ and while I’m not sure what folks mean by that, I do know that more than 10 years ago, a small group of music aficionados decided to take country music back from the over-fluffed, auto-tuned eye candy it had become during its 1990s explosion. Those pioneers chose as their banner the name Americana. Not so much a genre as a frame of reference, Americana embraced what was then called alt-country, folk, blues and bluegrass under a big tent. Now the trade group born of that movement, the Americana Music Association (AMA) boils the music’s many complexities down to the nice clear statement: “contemporary music that honors and/or derives from American roots music.”