Legacy & Influence / The Americana Genre

The Americana Genre

Nobody called it Americana in 1968. The word wouldn't exist as a formal genre label for another three decades, when the Americana Music Association organized in Nashville in 1999 to give a commercial and critical home to roots-oriented music that country radio no longer had room for. By the time that happened, critics were already reaching backward to name the group that had done it first. Britannica's own summary puts it plainly: the Band's sound served as a template for Americana, the hybrid, roots-oriented movement that came together decades later. AllMusic's Mark Deming went further, crediting the group with ushering in the roots-rock of the 1970s and embodying Americana in a way nobody else has approached.

What made Music from Big Pink and The Band sound like a genre before the genre existed was the specific mix: country, blues, gospel, and old-time string-band music, played with rock instrumentation but none of rock's usual volume or spectacle, arriving in 1968 right as psychedelia was at its loudest. Robertson's story-songs, drawing on Civil War history and rural labor struggles rather than personal confession, gave the sound a literary backbone that later Americana songwriters leaned on directly. Gram Parsons was doing something adjacent at almost the same moment with the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and the two strands, Parsons's country-rock and the Band's rootsier, more historical version, are generally treated as the twin taproots of everything that followed.

The clearest full-circle moment came in 2010, when the Grammys created a Best Americana Album category for the first time and gave the inaugural award to Levon Helm's Electric Dirt, a record made by a founding member of the group critics had spent decades calling the genre's actual origin point. The word entered Merriam-Webster's dictionary the following year. By the 2010s, acts like Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers, and the Avett Brothers had taken Americana from a niche industry classification into something that charted on Top 40 radio, all of it built, whether the newer artists knew it or not, on ground the Band had already walked.