Recasting ‘Americana’: Yee-Haw Isn’t Just for Cowboys Anymore. Or Old White Men.

 
collage by Maryam ElSharkawy

collage by Maryam ElSharkawy

In 1973, the Seattle-based country band Lavender Country released their self-titled debut album, widely regarded as the first openly gay-themed album in country music history. The album was funded entirely by Gay Community Social Services of Seattle, and the band performed at the first Seattle Pride Parade in 1974, before disbanding in 1976. No one has ever heard of Lavender Country, and yet they represent maybe the most ‘subversive’ act, and perhaps the most authentically ‘American’ act in country music history. But where are the supposed boundaries of the ‘country’ represented in country music? Who is ‘Americana’ enough for Americana?  Where are these places, and who lives there? 

John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, was the 1971 country ode to West Virginia. The track peaked at number 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart before becoming Denver’s most successful song, despite the fact that he’d never even been to West Virginia when he wrote it. The place names referenced in the song were found in an encyclopedia by the track’s songwriters the night before they sent it to their record label. It just goes to show that maybe the most ‘authentic’ image of America is the one built by those who are selling you something. An image. A brand. A lifestyle. When’s the last time you actually went on a road trip? But when’s the last time you saw a Ford commercial that depicted one?  

 As these two genres, historically tapped to represent the fly-over country the rest of America was too busy, or lazy to recognize, enter the twenty-first century (finally, I might add), America as a country itself is changing, and the country music your grandparents listened to fifty years ago just doesn’t cut it anymore. As the physical boundaries of the country are changing, the boundary lines of country and Americana music must shift too

I’m very American, a fact I only fully embraced about myself once I’d left America (I find you often don’t realize how shaped you are by where you come from until you’re no longer surrounded by people who pronounce words like ‘literally’ and ‘process’ the same way you do). I’ve lived in Scotland for the past three years and although I’ve integrated both British slang and British drinking habits into my lifestyle, I’m constantly reminded that my flat accent never goes away. And, although I actively insult my home country at nearly every given opportunity (my right as an American), I admit that the specific mythology of things like the great American road trip, the perfect pair of Levi’s, or driving off into the distance in a Chevy pickup and/or Harley Davidson motorcycle isn’t lost on me. American nostalgia runs deep.

I grew up in a household that appreciated all things folk, Americana, and country. The first songs I ever learned were those on Neil Young’s 1977 compilation album Decade that my dad played in the car. I still know all the words, which is a party trick that is both fun and completely useless. Artists including Townes Van Zandt, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, John Prine, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Bob Dylan’s country gem Nashville Skyline (1969) and, of course, Neil Young, represented an outsized portion of my musical knowledge until I got to about twelve and realized that miming the guitar solo to Neil Young’s ‘Down by the River’ with my dad in the car is in fact not how kids who actually want friends spend their time. So there’s some free advice. 

Nevertheless, I’ve always had a soft spot for those specific musical reference points, and any contemporary artist who offers a nod to them. So I’m sure you can imagine how life-changing it was for me when Lana Del Rey released her music video for ‘Ride’ in October 2012. The ‘Ride’ music video is the pop culture moment I can point to more readily than anything else for completely shaping my listening habits as an early teen, and re-introducing me to the concept of ‘Americana,’ whatever the hell that actually is. Something about Lana swinging on that tire swing in the middle of the desert (where did that swing even come from) to playing pinball with old men in a biker gang, to, unfortunately, wearing a Native American headdress while dancing around a bonfire (this is not okay ever, how was that not flagged by anyone on her team) was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Was it problematic that she was romanticizing troubling power dynamics in her relationships with older men? Yes. That headdress? It goes without saying. But Lana Del Rey, with her first two albums Born to Die and Paradise, is single-handedly responsible for resurrecting the American listener’s obsession with American nostalgia and America itself, in all of its complicated physical and historical geography. 

But exactly whose America is Lana describing? Her name dropping of California locations and visuals as well as musical homages to the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and The Hollywood Sign demonstrate an adherence to American vintage culture that is coated in the nostalgia of time passed, and in doing so misrepresents the realities of these pop culture heavyweights. It’s a curated American history rooted in white American privilege and the illusion of glamorized Hollywood, and, although perhaps done unconsciously, whitewashes her musical influences in the process. As Giovanni Russonello argues in The Atlantic, “If Americana represents some broad definition of American identity, then how does it manage to exclude the influence of so much music made here in the past 40 years? And where, you've got to wonder, are the artists of colour? Can a genre that offers itself up as a kind of fantasy soundtrack for this country afford to be so homogeneous and so staunchly archaic?” I couldn’t agree more. 

Modern guitar music is built upon the foundation of pioneering Black and brown artists. Before Keith Richards nailed the guitar solo on ‘Gimme Shelter’ or Jimmy Page’s playing on ‘Stairway to Heaven’ became immortalised in classic rock folklore, there was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose incorporation of heavy distortion within her electric guitar playing paved the way for modern rock, blues, and gospel. Even artists like Dolly Parton, who cites Appalachian ballads whose influences date back to the Trad music of Ireland, Scotland, and England, can’t ignore the influence of Black American artists like Lead Belly and Robert Johnson. And neither can Bob Dylan, even if he namechecks them in his songs. 

But where does someone like Kacey Musgraves fit into all of this? Or Lil Nas X performing ‘Old Town Road’ with Billy Ray Cyrus at Glastonbury in 2019? What about artist’s  listeners like even if they “don’t usually listen to country”. Indeed, Musgraves’ breakout single ‘Follow Your Arrow’ (2013) was blacklisted from country radio stations because it references smoking weed, and yet she still won Best Country Album at the Grammys that year for her debut album Same Trailer Different Park. While that might be more an indictment of the obliviousness of country radio executives and the boys club they perpetuate more than anything else, and Lil Nas X certainly has his detractors (satan shoes and ‘Call Me By Your Name’ twerking controversy included), what is the broader significance of him wearing a hot pink cowboy-inspired leather bondage outfit by Versace to the 2020 Grammys, complete with cowboy boots, cowboy hat, and BDSM harness? 

Or Orville Peck, whose debut album Pony (2019) cemented him as part John Wayne look-a-like, part gay country icon. Peck, who’s never seen performing without wearing a leather-fringe mask that obscures his face and identity, is described in Billboard as “straddling the divide between the sounds of classic stars like Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison or Waylon Jennings, and more contemporary sonic elements like dream-pop guitar riffs”. In the same Billboard article, Peck notes that country and punk, a subculture defined by its anarchist leanings and fuck-the-patriarchy messaging, are actually quite similar. 

"Country has a stigma of being conservative and only having one point of view, which is usually a straight white male,” he says. “And to an extent, it has for a long time in parts of it, but there's also a lot of incredible marginalized voices coming from country music, and there always have been.” Indeed, as these artists become country’s modern heroes, the Americana aesthetic is itself being subverted, re-imagined, and re-interpreted within a 21st century context. But maybe this isn’t as radical as it seems. Maybe country’s stars are actually just beginning to catch up and finally meet a country audience that’s always been there, waiting for an artist who finally looks or talks like them. 

And what about Lana, who built the prototype for this modern fascination with an America now passed? She’s still learning too. Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Lana’s most recent album released this past March, marks a notable departure from both the Southern California coast and the streets of New York City which localized her earlier works, traversing an expansive American geography that includes Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, places long forgotten from the pop culture discourse but which lend themselves to the romanticism of the open road. Perhaps this is the ‘real Americana’ Lana has been searching for.

 Closing with a cover of Joni Mitchell’s classic, ‘For Free,’ from Mitchell’s 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon, itself a nod to the artistic and bohemian communities which defined Laurel Canyon in the mid to late ‘60s, Lana demonstrates she is as deft at referencing nostalgia as ever. It looks like a new lady has moved to the canyon, and, if this recent resurgence of country and Americana has taught us anything, it’s that the old and new remain inherently interwoven, and that there’s plenty of room for others to join if they’d like to.  In this re-claimed America, everyone is invited.

Soundtracking The New Americana

  • Chemtrails over the Country Club (2021) - Lana Del Rey

  • Golden Hour (2018) - Kacey Musgraves

  • ‘7’ (2019)- Lil Nas X

  • Pony (2019) - Orville Peck

  • ‘Show Pony’ (2020) - Orville Peck 

  • ‘Orville Peck’s Queer Appalachia’ playlist on Spotify

  • ‘Tropico’ by Lana Del Rey (watch the video here), a short film and accompanying EP featuring songs from Del Rey’s second album Paradise, which recasts the origin story of Adam and Eve within the landscape of vintage American pop culture, featuring cameos from Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. 

  • And the OG subversive country album, Lavender Country (1973) by Lavender Country, which pushed the boundaries necessary to create a space for the contemporary alt-country landscape. 

 
Julianna Ritzubatch 5