Arts and Entertainment

Charlie Worsham is one of Music City’s most respected “multi-hyphenate” music-makers - an artist-singer-songwriter-picker-producer who’s had his hand in scores of hit records while releasing much-admired albums of his own over a 20 year career in town. Craig regards him as a “Music Row whisperer,” a guy with his finger on the pulse of the industry and a well-rooted point of view in the music he makes. He returns to the String with the new album Once Upon A Second Time Around and, though he didn’t know it at the time, a new Grand Ole Opry member trophy.

From her out-of-the-way home town in Michigan, Rachel Brooke has quietly achieved veteran status as a highly acclaimed songwriter and singer. Her latest album This One’s For You investigates honky tonk dreams that won’t die and reminds us that great country songs don’t all pass through a Nashville filter.

This week marks one month until Americanafest 2026, so the wheels have been turning around here. Today we share the lineup for our ninth annual Americanafest Day Stage, presented in partnership with NPR Music, World Cafe, and Nashville PBS. It’s one of the strongest lineups ever, and the event will be broadcast and webcast widely.

One of the stars of Nashville’s recent honky tonk boom first found her muse playing in late night jazz clubs of New York and Paris. That set Sweet Megg apart when she moved here just after the pandemic - a flair for early blues and hot club swing. In Music City, she’s also developed as a songwriter releasing stylish Americana fare, but she continues to mine the catalog for golden nuggets she can make her own, as on her latest Massive Negroni.

In The Hour Of Chaos, Allison Russell’s third solo album, brings the power of harmony and solidarity to a time of division and fear. In an interview days before its release, the songwriter says her “rainbow coalition” of collaborators has grown since her breakout album Outside Child of 2021, and many of them, including Brittney Spencer, Norah Jones, and Kashus Culpepper, sing duets with her. She also gets into her foundations in folk music during her pre-Nashville years.

His biography sounds like several different people: accomplished jazz guitar player, New York City glam rocker, progressive Americana songwriter in Nashville. That’s why Aaron Lee Tasjan comes across as a true American original. Over 13 years in Music City, Tasjan’s been prolific and acclaimed, releasing half a dozen albums touching many colors of pop music. His latest came after a time of discouragement and personal re-building, so it’s called Get Over It, Underdog.

As Avery Hellman came of age in California, she took advantage of her good fortune being from the family that established the game-changing Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco. It exposed her to standard-setting songwriting and artistry in folk and roots music, and with a bit of reluctance, she became an artist too under the name Ismay. Her two albums, Desert Pavement and the new Half Truth, are alive with a poet’s ear for language and eye for landscape, plus a crafty marriage of melodies and chords. She’s also the filmmaker behind the exploratory documentary Finding Lucinda, about Lucinda Williams.

Devon Gilfillian has been a key artist fulfilling the promise of a New Music City - a Nashville that’s been welcome to the widest ever range of genres, influences and innovations. He came to town with no contacts and a job with AmeriCorps in 2013. But before very long he’d landed a major label deal and national radio hits - all with an iconoclastic take on soul, funk and Americana. His newest album - his second for the prestigious Fantasy Records - is a beautiful grooving swirl called Time Will Tell.

The Telluride Bluegrass Festival launched in 1974 as an out-of-the-way town party for locals on the Fourth of July. A year later, they reached out to a promising Kentucky band called New Grass Revival, setting in motion a musical revelation and revolution. In the decades since, Colorado’s loftiest roots music fest has been the stage where old and new bluegrass have coexisted and fed one another. Craig was able to get out for the 53rd annual event, and he filed this report.

Songwriter and artist Tenille Townes is a certified star in Canada where she’s won heaps of awards and seen her moving songs top the country charts. In over a dozen years in Nashville, she’s been an impressive songwriter with one foot in major label country and another in Americana. Now with a lovely self-produced acoustic album called The Acrobat, Townes points to an independent future with a unique vision and a renewed sense of self.