Americana

Americana is the format category the music industry created in 1995 to handle the growing number of artists making country, folk and roots music outside the Nashville mainstream: the Grammy category arrived in 2009. But the music it describes is older — Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris and the alternative country scenes of the 1980s and 1990s (No Depression magazine, the Bloodshot Records catalog) were all practicing it before it had a name.

Emmylou Harris, who began as Gram Parsons’ partner and became the genre’s most consistent practitioner for five decades, is Americana’s central figure. “Boulder to Birmingham” (1975) — written after Parsons’ death as an elegy — captured the movement’s emotional register: honest, restrained, rooted in tradition and suffused with loss.

Uncle Tupelo (No Depression, 1990; March 16-20, 1992), Wilco, Son Volt, the Jayhawks and the whole No Depression scene of the 1990s articulated an alternative country that was consciously connected to the outlaw country tradition and to folk music’s values. Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle represent the singer-songwriter branch; Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell the rock-inflected branch; Alison Krauss and Noam Pikelny the acoustic/bluegrass branch. All are Americana.