Mavis Staples and the folk supergroup I’m With Her were validated as the class of the Americana field at the Grammy Awards on Sunday, while the prime time broadcast sidelined roots music just when Americans need it most. Interest in folk, hard country, and bluegrass seem on the rise in the marketplace, but you wouldn’t know it from the almost eight hours of ceremony split between an afternoon online segment and what’s now known to be CBS’s final network broadcast of the Recording Academy’s signature event.
While Nashvillians struggled to get their power back after a historic ice storm, Americana music was largely blacked out at the Grammys. Country legend Reba McEntire shared stage time with Brandy Clark and Lukas Nelson during a sequence of in memoriam sets, but otherwise the show was entirely built on spectacle-based rock, pop, and hip-hop. The afternoon Premiere Ceremony had more range and roots focus as always, but it too was more uneventful than in recent years due to many winner no-shows and no star turn Americana performances.
Staples, the 86-year-old matriarch of soul, won Best Americana Performance for “Godspeed” and Best American Roots Performance for “Beautiful Strangers,” both from her celebrated November 2025 album Sad And Beautiful World. She was not on hand to accept. But the trio of Sarah Jarosz, Sara Watkins, and Aoife O’Donovan were there, making two appearances at the podium to accept awards for Best Folk Album - for their Josh Kaufman produced Wild And Clear And Blue - and American Roots Song for that album’s opening cut, “Ancient Light."
O’Donovan noted the caliber of writers in the category, which included Jason Isbell, Jesse Welles, and Sierra Hull. Jarosz noted the band’s support and good fortune as “amazing,” pointing out that “we get to work with so many amazing people, and also the fact that this is a songwriters award. We love writing together, and so it's so special.” I observed last May that the album’s songs expressed uncanny clarity of imagination and purpose for three-way co-writes.
Wild And Clear And Blue wound up atop many best-of lists and was clearly a masterpiece of 2025. When it was confirmed as Best Folk Album mere minutes later, Watkins said the group was “dumfounded” and that the harmonious team of individual roots music stars “leaned on inspiration from so many people whose songwriting we really have grown up on, and that kind of made its way into our bones.” I’m With Her, which lived its first iteration in the late 2010s, had one Grammy nomination coming into this year, so these marked their first wins as a group, during its second time around.
Eclectic, Julliard-trained polymath Jon Batiste snuck in and snatched the Best Americana Album Grammy from a curious collection of nominees that included country from Willie Nelson, fuzz-toned blues rock from Larkin Poe, folk rock from man-of-the-moment Jesse Welles, and Molly Tuttle’s acoustic pop turn. For the first time I can remember, the list had zero overlap with last fall’s Americana Awards nominees in the same category. And while Batiste certainly embodies American roots heritage with his updates on New Orleans R&B and gospel, he’s largely disconnected from the Americana industry base. While WMOT played select songs, neither his album nor its tracks made the radio charts top 100 for last year.
While Batiste himself was not in the auditorium, a team of his collaborators accepted the award, with co-producer Nick Waterhouse reading a statement of important values from the artist, in absentia: “Thank God. Real musicians and real people playing in the same room together is one of the oldest traditions in humanity, and must be protected. We call on the DSPs, the Academy, the corporations, the big money, to protect our humanity (in) music right now.” Batiste’s quote also touched on one other elephant in the room: “Americana comes in many different shades, and this is a country of immigrants, and we'd all like to remind you of that.”
The blues categories spread the love among generations as well, with 89-year-old icon Buddy Guy winning Best Traditional Blues Album for the defiantly titled Ain’t Done With The Blues. And in one of the afternoon’s most exciting moments, steel guitar master and fiery band leader Robert Randolph won his first Grammy Award, after numerous nominations, for his Sun Records release Preacher Kids in the Best Contemporary Blues category. “I don't have any words,” said an ebullient, emotional Randolph. “I'm nominated against all my friends. Oh my, so grateful. I never cried on stage. So I guess I might cry. It's been a long 20 years!”
The Grammy national broadcast missed a precious opportunity to uplift roots music with the 100th anniversary of Clifton Chenier and the important various artists album A Tribute To The King of Zydeco, which won Best Regional Roots Music Album late Sunday afternoon. The album, produced by outstanding figures Joel Savoy, Steve Berlin, and C.C. Adcock, has been widely praised as a substantial enhancement to the story of Chenier and the genre he helped pioneer. But accordions and southern grit weren’t part of the larger show, where, to my ears, the only performance that felt historic was a remarkably coordinated cavalcade of brilliant Black icons, anchored by the flawless voice of Lauren Hill, paying tribute to D’Angelo and Roberta Flack.
Tyler Childers, who very much wants to be associated with country more than Americana, got his wish, winning his first Grammy Award in the Best Country Song category. His eccentric “Bitin’ List,” edged out stars like Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson. His album Snipe Hunter was up for the first-ever Best Contemporary Album award, but it didn’t receive as many votes as winner Beautifully Broken by Jelly Roll. Receiving his award on the CBS broadcast, the new country superstar sounded like a preacher as he thanked Jesus above all and vociferously.
Naturally, the inaugural Best Traditional Country Album award was handed out during the day and it went to Ain’t In It For My Health, by the insurgent star and former bluegrasser Zach Top. “This is insane,” he said at the podium. “I feel like I watched the Grammys as a little kid and (they) looked like superheroes up on TV. So to be here and be a little part of the whole thing is insane.” He called it insane a third time before stepping off. Top made the Americana charts briefly last year in a duo with Billy Strings, but his album may ride an inch over the commercial country line for many Americana programmers (though again, WMOT did spin . It ought to get more airtime because he’s a grassroots indie story, and his values are as in tune with Josh Hedley as with George Strait.
Speaking of Billy Strings, he won his third Best Bluegrass Album Grammy since 2021 for the much-lauded Highway Prayers. String was presumably on the highway fulfilling dates on his sold-out winter tour.
Roots and blues enjoyed another nexus of success on Sunday as music from the movie Sinners won two awards, including Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media. The film, set in the 1930s, brought in a host of talent under the supervision of producers Ryan Coogler, Ludwig Göransson and Serena Göransson, plus music supervisor Nikki Sherod. On the soundtrack: Bobby Rush, Cedric Burnside, Rhiannon Giddens, Justin Robinson, Tierinii Jackson of Southern Avenue, Sharde Thomas, and Lola Kirke.
Roots music has cycled in and out of mainstream consciousness since the folk revival of the 1950s and 60s. O Brother, Where Art Thou? dominated the Grammy Awards 24 years ago. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss surged folk and roots back to the fore with an Album of the Year Grammy and four others in 2009. And 2024 saw the lightning strikes of Joni Mitchell’s comeback performance and the surprise duet by Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs. Last year and this year, not so much.
While McEntire, Clark and Nelson sounded lovely singing an updated take on the 2025 single “Trailblazer” by McEntire, Lainey Wilson and Miranda Lambert, their screen time was emotionally dominated by the roll call of music’s fallen, including Todd Snider, Raul Malo, and Steve Cropper. This despite a Grammy community that seemed to be searching for the words to express widespread outrage about federal immigration enforcement and a general list toward authoritarian government. Jesse Welles was on hand to present during the daytime ceremony, but he didn’t get a chance to sing one of his trenchant protest songs. Maybe next year the folk singer will be back in vogue. Hint to the producers: they’ll only need a fraction of the production budget you devoted to Sabrina Carpenter and Tyler The Creator.
