Prologue - “Americana” at century’s end

With little fanfare and without anyone really taking notice, a new type of music appeared during the early months of 1997 in the bins of record shops, the announcements of CD catalogues, and on radio folk-music shows: “Americana.” From the beginning it was hard to determine what Americana was, or rather, what it embraced. Americana surely embraced folk music, and, indeed, many singer-songwriters were quick to use the term to refer to the music they created and performed. Singer-songwriters are on the whole politically liberal, which by extension suggests that Americana does not have the more conservative overtones it might otherwise possess. The music of this “Americana,” moreover, is eclectic, multicultural, and multiracial; its styles embrace ethnic diversity, and its repertories self-consciously reflect racial diversity, notably the blues. Americana, so it seems at first glance, offers something to everyone. It’s a music that provides aesthetic and ideological identity to each individual and to a limitless range of cultural and political issues. If stylistic borders are blurred in Americana, the ability to use music to cross social and class borders is nonetheless crucial to the cultural agenda of those who perform and consume it, those who transfer its sense of engagement with America to their own lives.

Americana is taking shape as the twentieth century is coming to a close. Not only is it a product of a particular moment in American history, but it is a music that describes and ascribes the changing American identities that mark that moment. Through its wanton embrace of folk, ethnic, racial, regional, and class distinctions Americana lays claim to multiculturalism and postmodernism, that is to the aesthetic ideologies of inclusivity that characterized many sectors of American society in the post-Civil Rights and post-Vietnam era of the 1970s and 1980s. With its political agendas Americana strives to memorialize the folk-music revivals of the 1950s and 1960s, and before that of the 1930s.