Put A Record On: Americana Awards Snubs Through The Years

Would it shock you to learn most of them are women?

We all know well, I think, that awards for art are generally pretty dumb. It's a challenge to get people to agree on anything, much less to vote with foresight about what the most significant music or movie or TV show in recent months has been; add on a nebulous framework like "Americana" and you've got a scenario ripe for a little revisionist history. I thought it might be interesting to look back at everyone who's been nominated and won in the Album and Song of the Year categories since the awards' genesis in 2002, and make a playlist of some of the "losers" — some of whom I figured might be new to me.

What I didn't expect, though, is how many of the people who got nominated and lost — in some cases over and over again — were women. Women and men who are not white have an even lower hit rate (I wasn't tracking diligently, but I'm not sure a not-white man has ever even been nominated in the Album or Song categories...); I don't believe a woman of color had won before Allison Russell in 2002. More than once, I was looking at categories where there was only one white man nominated...and he won. (How often was said man Jason Isbell? Well...).

Anyway! Always good to remind ourselves of the biases of even nominally progressive institutions; better still to remember some great music that deserved all the recognition. Below are just a couple standouts...

"Truth No. 2," The Chicks: Now did the Chicks need an Americana Award at this particular juncture? Not really, as country radio had only just started to turn on them. But imagine an alternate history where they were welcomed into the Americana fold with open arms — enthusiastically claimed as one of the genre's own. They would get snubbed again with "Not Ready To Make Nice" (somehow)...not too surprising, then, that they stopped chasing them.

The Way I'm Livin', Lee Ann Womack: Basically the same story, a decade-ish later — Lee Ann puts up a basically perfect album, and doesn't take home the prize. As we've discussed, she just didn't get the warm reception she deserved and now...when are we going to get another Lee Ann album??? Impossible to say.

Tomorrow Is My Turn, Rhiannon Giddens: We're missing layups here, folks. Don't you think they wish that some of Rhiannon's abundant press materials could read, "winner of TK Americana Music Awards"? Alas!