The term “Americana” has been around for a long time. Its origins can be traced back to the early 1900s, but it really began to take shape during the resurgence of American folk music in the 1940s and '50s. Artists like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez made music that was, at the time, hard to classify into a genre. Over the years Americana has seen a bit of an evolution. However, unlike modern rock, country, and pop music, whose sounds are largely unrecognizable from their original iterations, Americana as a genre seems to have cast a wider and wider net. Musicians who might have been classified as country or rock in the past instead find themselves accepting the label of Americana.
Today if you Google it — and I did — you will find it involves a blend of several styles including country, bluegrass, folk and others. IPR’s own Americana and roots program, Rust On The Dial, plays an Americana mix that includes big names like Marty Stuart, Bob Dylan, John Prine, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and The Allman Brothers, while also including local and independent artists like Ducharme-Jones, William Elliott Whitmore and Bo Ramsey. Much of this music is as difficult to classify today as the resurgent folk music of Seeger and Baez was in the mid-20th century.
Considering all of this left me curious: How would some of those artists define Americana? I decided to ask some of Iowa’s most qualified minds to weigh in on the topic. I contacted several prominent Iowa-based musical acts and asked them each the same two questions:
- What is Americana and what separates Americana from the other styles mentioned above?
- Are you an Americana artist?
I felt the second question was important because musicians are often placed into categories and classified as one style or another without their own input. I personally would put each of the following artists under the umbrella of Americana, but would they agree?
What is Americana?
William Elliott Whitmore
Americana as a concept is slippery to pin down. Our human brains both crave categories AND seek to defy them. We wouldn’t call Dolly Parton Americana, even though she is American and tells stories of a certain type of American experience. The same with Leadbelly, George Jones, Aretha Franklin, Buck Owens, or the Allman Brothers. But one could consider it this way: those artists are the strands of DNA, and Americana is the double helix itself. A true culmination of music and culture that is specific to this country and our complicated history.
Weary Ramblers
The term “Americana” applies to many of us songwriters who find ourselves, out of a love for music itself, drifting between the multiple genres of American music. As writers, we like to think that each song tells us what it wants to be… and the listener categorizes it after its creation.
Abbie Sawyer
I see Americana, just like America itself, as a melting pot. Whether it’s in fashion or food or music or culture. What separates Americana from other genres, in my view, is mainly marketing. And perspective. For example, one of my groups, Abbie and the Sawyers, has been called Americana over the years. I think the presence of banjo with acoustic guitars and a double bass makes Americana an accessible label. We’ve also been called folk and bluegrass.
Perhaps the content of our songs also lends itself to being called Americana. With tracks about our love of Iowa and cicadas, and the Midwest experience, we locate ourselves among the grasses and plains of the ol’ Midwest, U.S. of A. And that feels like folk music about a piece of America, hence Americana.
Ducharme-Jones
Americana is a blend of folk, country and roots music from the 1940s that became more mainstream in the 1990s. Dave’s band The Rainravens in Austin in 1996 produced their first album (of nine total) that was coined “Americana” and recognized by the Gavin Report in their top ten on the Americana chart. The Rainravens were on the rise alongside Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Wayne Hancock, Elliott Murphy and more, and they toured internationally. Interestingly, there was a pocket of Rainravens fans in New York City and throughout Europe.
Matt Woods
To me “Americana” is a blending of several styles of American music… Blues, Country, Rock and Roll, etc. The idea that it’s a mix of several styles is what kind of makes it its own style!
Jordan Messerole
I understand Americana music to be an umbrella term to help cover songwriters and bands that don’t fit into one of these other traditional categories of music. They're creating music that shares elements of country or American folk music but don’t always conform to the traditional standards of one of those types of music. When you hear the term Bluegrass music, a person can estimate what that’s going to sound like. However, if you take the instruments of a bluegrass band and play them in more of a Rock and Roll manner, a bluegrass purist will tell you that’s not real bluegrass. Americana music creates this safe harbor of using influences of all sorts of American music styles to make something they want to hear.
The Bird Hunters (Blake Van Houten)
When discussing and putting labels on any type of art it can be very subjective and opinions can differ widely, however, here is how I think of it.
Simply put, Americana is the blending of country music and rock music. I'll expand a bit.
Because lyrical content can be so subjective I think it's easier to look at the instrumentation for examples of how this blending takes place. These will be generalizations.
In traditional country music the acoustic guitar plays the changes and drives the song forward. A fiddle, pedal steel guitar or a telecaster (yes, specifically a telecaster) would add melodic ideas throughout and even take a solo at times. A drummer is going to stick mainly to the kick, snare and hi-hat, playing simple grooves and keeping a steady beat, perhaps a "train beat." The bass player, most likely upright, is holding down the low end and supporting everything with a "root and fifth" pattern or maybe a "walking bassline." The sound stays fairly mild throughout, but always tasteful.
Now take a rock band for example. Guitars are now plugged in and amplified to the point of distortion. They're playing riffs and "power-chords" to drive the song along. Guitars will also be the main soloing instrument. Drums are big and bombastic, adding low end to the mix using toms. They play big fills and mark sections with heavy use of crash cymbals. The bass is plugged into a huge 8x10 cabinet and is playing riffs to match the guitars or mainly sticking to root notes, while adding the occasional bass fill to add some interest as the song drives forward. The mix is loud and in your face.
Now that we have the recipe for each style of music we can now cherry pick our favorite parts of these two styles of music, blend them together and what we have is what I think of as Americana. Here's one recipe I came up with.
An electric guitar with a mild amount of distortion opens up the song not with a riff, but some basic "cowboy chords" instead of an acoustic guitar. The drums and bass enter with a simple fill to help propel the song forward, but wait — there's a fiddle and pedal steel on stage too. They each take turns trading melodic ideas in between lyrical phrases. The solo section comes up and pedal steel is able to poke out of the mix with a loud and clean tone. All the while, the electric guitar is holding down the chords. The music never becomes too ruckus, but does carry an edge. That, to me, is Americana.
I'll again reiterate that this is a generalization and most all music lives on a spectrum. There are no hard and fast rules and rules are meant to be broken. I'm sure any reader could send me a Spotify playlist that completely goes against everything I've just said.
A quick summary
Considering this input, I think the takeaway is that Americana is largely seen as a safe and ambiguous way to categorize music that would otherwise be forced into a category where it does not fit. Whether it's a mix of instrumentation, production styles or the content of the lyrics themselves, the Americana vein can be represented in different ways by different artists. Whether it is, as Sawyer suggested, mostly driven by marketing or, as Whitmore suggested, driven by the human mind’s need to both classify and defy classification at the same time, listeners have been responding as Americana has surged in popularity in the past two decades.
Music is often classified without the input of the musician. As the Weary Ramblers said, the listener categorizes it after its creation. The musician and performer are often told what genre they fit into without consideration of their own opinion. So, it seems only fitting to ask them how they each viewed their own music.
Are you an Americana act?
William Elliott Whitmore
I would not consider myself an Americana artist. I think I may exist in a liminal space between worlds: that hallway that connects folk, country and CBGBs.
Weary Ramblers
Weary Ramblers fit nicely into the Americana category, because of the creative freedom it allows us.
Abbie Sawyer
“Americana” is a lovely catch all, which works well for someone like me who resists boxes.
Ducharme-Jones
We consider our band an Americana roots-rock act. Our writing and performance style crosses the genres of folk, country and rock. We are eclectic in our writing. Add to that the fact that since the '90s, the Americana genre has broadened further to include bands like Gov’t Mule, Dave Matthews, Margo Price, Patty Griffin and Jason Isbell.
Matt Woods
As to whether or not I’m an Americana act, I don’t really think like that. I am a musician, and I don’t want to put labels on what I do. My job is to make music, other people can decide what to call it (assuming anyone is actually listening). I have worked hard to be competent and knowledgeable in all forms of American roots music, and hopefully that comes through in my own music. Ultimately, I am just trying to express myself, whatever that sounds like.
Jordan Messerole
I believe that I am an Americana act. I think there’s a preconceived belief that I’m a country artist with some folks, and that's bolstered with my October release of my seventh record St. Something or Other. It sounds like a pretty traditional country and western album. But when I follow it up with my Blue Collar Tragedies record in June of 2025, that’s a horse of a different color. It’ll be much closer to a Rock and Roll record. Part of what’s great about being a solo songwriter is that I can write in whatever style I’m feeling in the moment and I don’t have to stick to a genre. Having a term like “Americana music” gives people like me something to tether to.
The Bird Hunters (Blake Van Houten)
Yes, I do consider us to be an Americana act. However, I do think Americana lives under the country music umbrella. So we are first a country band, then if you want to get more specific I think the description of Americana would fit just fine. Some of our songs lean more country, some learn more rock, most fall somewhere in between.
Parting thoughts
Having read all of the answers, I am reminded of the answer given to Variety by one of the most successful Americana artists of all time – Brandi Carlile. “I’m aware that there’s a certain amount of mystery around the concept of what Americana is. We’ve all joked around about it; we’ve all said that it’s country music for liberals. It’s not that. And it doesn’t really come down to instrumentation or tempo, or even really subject matter. It’s starting to feel more and more, to me, like it’s based on an ideology of inclusion” Carlile says.
Or, as IPR's music director, and the host of Rust on the Dial, Al Schares, puts it: "There isn't a simple answer here. Brandi Carlile may be on to something, but I think Harlan Howard, who is thought to have coined the phrase in the '50s 'three chords and the truth' to describe country music, comes even closer. I think music we consider to be 'Americana' has something to do with a simple expression of something that has the ring of truth."
That “ideology of inclusion,” or that simple expression of something having the ring of truth, just might be the reason that so many artists who don’t sound very similar find themselves leaning in to the Americana label, while others who are hesitant to define their own music find themselves accepted into the genre of Americana by default. The genre collects music and musicians who speak and play a truth that doesn't nicely fit other genres.
