The Americana Music Association is like the proverbial dog that caught the car.
Now what?
As the AMA wraps up its 25th anniversary year, the Americana scene it’s helped foster is bigger and more star-studded than its original organizers might have predicted. Today’s top artists fill arenas and theaters. Once a proud niche, Americana now boasts artists who are household names, touring by bus, and living in the feeds of younger people scrolling TikTok. Roots music hasn’t been at the center of national attention like it is today since the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack days of the early 2000s, and maybe since the folk revival of the 1960s.
John Laird, a former agent who publishes newsletters about tours and venues, identifies five current acts - Tyler Childers, Billy Strings, Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile and Zach Bryan - as Americana’s arena acts. Besides them, “there are quite a few Americana acts playing large clubs and theaters,” he said by email, identifying more than 35 by name, such as Greensky Bluegrass and Sierra Ferrell. “They do not have arena-level popularity, but are enjoying high level career success.”
It’s a world that the professionals who gathered in Austin and Nashville in 1999 to launch AMA would have thought “unimaginable,” according to Tamara Saviano, a former board president and author of the forthcoming 2025 book Poets & Dreamers: My Life In Americana Music. According to her reporting, the founding council “didn't know what to expect. It was all about trying to get a radio format off the ground.” They were, she says, trying to coordinate industry sectors and stakeholders, hoping to emulate some of the results of the International Bluegrass Music Association, which was then about ten years old.
Today, with Americana albums regularly appearing in the country Top 10, key players in the format take some pride that the Americana music has thrived without making some of the commercial compromises of the hit country radio game. “I think the Americana Association has done a great job of establishing itself in the industry and growing and doing the things they set out to do,” says artist manager and board member Courtney Gregg. “I mean, the last two years have just been insane.”
And Jed Hilly, AMA Executive Director since 2007, told me that “I think that the 33 people who sat in that room to create the Americana Music Association are pleasantly pleased, not necessarily surprised.”
Americana 501 101
The AMA is a 501(c)(6) professional trade organization with annual budgets of up to $1.5 million before the pandemic and just under a million annually since then. Its mission, revised in 2012, is “to advocate for the authentic voice of American Roots Music around the world.” This language marked a shift, says Hilly, from an original mission more focused on networking and building the business side. Shifting to an artist and art-focused mission, he said, helped grow attendance at Americanafest year on year by 10-20%, making the event the core initiative and fund-raiser for the organization.
But the association does more than its signature conference and festival, including: producing the Americana Honors & Awards (including its now annual PBS broadcast in partnership with Austin City Limits), maintaining the Americana Airplay Chart for the industry, sending out the This Week In Americana newsletter with new album releases and news, and conducting research and marketing on behalf of the format.
Then there are the specific initiatives and milestones AMA has been able to pull off over the past 25 years. Hilly was tenacious about getting Miriam Webster to add a musical definition of Americana to the dictionary, which they did in 2011: “a genre of American music having roots in early folk and country music.”
A longstanding effort to give Americana impact at the Grammy Awards was accomplished in several stages. In 2007, the Recording Academy rebranded its Best Contemporary Folk Recording as Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album. By 2010, Americana Album had its own category. Today, there are two named Americana categories and, if one counts blues, folk, bluegrass, and regional roots music, nine categories that directly implicate Americana artists.
In 2020, AMA launched its biggest new direction yet with the formation of the Americana Music Foundation, a charitable 501(c)(3) entity that cultivates cultural and educational partnerships and possibilities. “We want the foundation to educate not only today’s generation but also future generations on the music that’s resonated with us and soundtracked our lives as an indelible piece of our culture,” says its website. So far that’s taken shape as video interviews with legacy artists as part of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History inaugural Roots to Pop series. And they’ve launched an artist in residency program at New York University, starting with Rosanne Cash and Taj Mahal. Courtney Gregg says this new endeavor is “a game changer” and that “there's so much outreach we could be doing at universities” where new generations of potential fans can be reached.
Diverse Directions
No review of AMA’s trajectory and priorities of the past decade or so would be complete without acknowledging its efforts to help artists of color and LGBTQ artists feel welcome and relevant in the community. Showcasing the Black roots of Americana seems to have begun tangibly with more diverse selections for Lifetime Achievement Awards and invitations to perform at the Ryman Auditorium awards show. Allen Toussaint was honored (as a producer) in 2006, followed by Mavis Staples (for advocacy and free speech) in 2007. R&B great Solomon Burke made a memorable performance in 2005, and later lifetimers include William Bell, Irma Thomas and Buddy Guy. In 2019, a partnership of AMA and the National Museum of African American Music initiated a new Legacy of Americana Award honoring Black pioneers in roots music.
Meanwhile, the Honors and Awards featured the Carolina Chocolate Drops in 2010 as they reached their pinnacle of fame, inspiring young and emerging Black talent to participate in old-time, blues, soul and R&B and to claim space in the Americana ecosystem. Panels at the conference over the past decade have also recognized those genre traditions as foundational to Americana music and normalized racial diversity (and queerness) in the talent pool and, to a lesser extent so far, the fan base.
“AmericanaFest does this a lot more authentically (and is) a lot more welcoming than other country spaces,” said Chantrel Reynolds, moderator of a panel called Black Voices Amplified at this fall’s conference. At the same time, artists and advocates have argued that a lot more work remains on the executive and gatekeeper side of the format, where professionals are almost exclusively white. “Diversity without equity and inclusion is not diversity,” said Kirstyn Nimmo, founder of diversity consulting agency Goodworx this fall.
Members On The Future
In an effort to find out what the AMA membership and community thinks, WMOT, along with a team of reporters from MTSU’s College of Media and Entertainment, surveyed about two dozen conferees during and after Americanafest, finding broad support for the AMA’s direction and subtly different perceptions of the AMA’s mission.
Kim Townsend, a singer-songwriter who’s been a regular attendee, said the mission is “to be true to the artists and true to the songs, and steer clear of commercialism - keep things real and rootsy and authentic. You know, not be all glitzy and gross.” Many, like Lindsay Mackintosh, who works at American Songwriter magazine and who’s attended the fest for a couple of years, says that AMA aspires “to bring recognition to the art of making Americana music and supporting artists who create that music,” a common sentiment, though few elaborated on whether that “support” should take more tangible or novel forms.
Meghann Wright, marketing director for the newly created Sun Label Group, told us that AMA’s diversity direction is great but possibly not thinking broadly enough. “When I hear the word Americana, it makes me think of everyone that has ever lived here, from Native Americans to Black Americans to Asian Americans to White Americans,” she said. “And we all have our own cultures and our own roots music, and I feel like Americana is the perfect home for that, and we all kind of get to meld in this beautiful melting pot and influence each other and be influenced by each other.”
Most emphasized values and protecting integrity and art as a higher priority than commerce. It’s a “genre that speaks the truth” said one person, while another said “what we need more of is storytelling, not just pop music and good beats, but actually storytelling music.” Martin Anderson, music director at North Carolina radio station WNCW, told me he’d like to see more vigilance on behalf of the deep roots - “Appalachian, old-time, bluegrass have always been a lot more on the periphery than I thought they should be,” he said.
A music fan from North Carolina on his second trip to the fest likes what he sees as an AMA that enables collaborations. “They encourage folks to work together,” he said. While not a specific priority of AMA, the culture it sets does lead to a lot of cross pollination. Another first-year attendee, musician Jeremy Mikush, called for more spaces for musicians to get together, pull out their instruments, and jam.
This feels instructive, because while jamming has been a central part of IBMA’s World of Bluegrass for its entire existence, Americanafest hardly ever inspires spontaneous group picking. This is a bottom up kind of phenomenon that can’t be replicated at will, but it speaks to a culture in bluegrass that does more than AMA to onboard new musicians, encourage their study of the American repertoire, and provide stages and educational forums where amateurs can become more active fans or even professional players. This is one possible new direction for AMA to think about, but the veterans approached for this article offered others.
“I think we should always be reassessing. I also think that it needs to be young people doing the reassessing and looking at the future,” Saviano says. “I think it's time for old people to pass the torch, quite frankly, as far as the association goes, because you're never going to get fresh blood and new ideas if you don't bring in the next generations. I'm not saying everybody should quit. But it's time to pass the torch.”
John Allen, president of New West Records and a former board member, said something similar - that attracting younger professionals and artists to AMA membership and board positions can help tell a more persuasive public story, “Hopefully the trade organization can keep up with this wave of success,” he says. “And I hate to say this, but I think it's more in the social media realm. I'm not saying Americana has to have a TikTok, but they kind of need to grow” their marketing efforts and drive a cultural narrative.
For current board member and music industry veteran Tracy Gershon, it’s a challenge of growing revenue through whatever means. “Honestly, I think we're underfunded. We can grow and do some new initiatives, and we still need to do outreach,” she said. “I think Jed Hilly has been operating with a shoestring budget, and has been doing a great job. Let's face it. You can only do so much when you don't have enough resources.”
Hilly, who’s presided over a lot of change since 2007, addressed several of these issues, including his own status as executive director in our conversation. “I see that I've been here for a while. I have no intention of going anywhere right away,” he said. “But there are a lot of younger people, and the music business has always been based on younger people. I'm looking to focus my energy on bringing that next generation in and on continuing the strides we've made in being a fair, equitable, diverse community. And to also focus on the Foundation and on creating more opportunities and more partnerships for the education (about) this great community of music.”
The AMA is currently taking nominations for new members of its board of directors from and among its 4000 members. Write-in nominations (which require the backing of 120 members to qualify) must be emailed by a current voting member with a 100-word biography to board@americanamusic.org by midnight on Wednesday, November 13. Members will vote on a slate of board members between Nov. 20-25.
WMOT thanks reporters Kailee Shores, Emma Burden, Bailey Brantingham, Noah McLane, and Kerstie Wolaver for their contributions to this story.
