Ken Pomeroy Lands Two Americana Honors Nominations

Cruel Joke put Ken Pomeroy in two places on the same ballot. The record is nominated for Album of the Year at the 25th Americana Honors and its author is nominated for Emerging Act of the Year, which is an unusual pairing: the album category is where established writers usually sit, and the emerging category is where they are not.

The winners are announced on Wednesday 16 September at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the hallmark event of AmericanaFest, which runs 15-19 September in its 26th year.

What Cruel Joke Is Up Against

The Album of the Year field is five records, and the production credits are as telling as the names. Pomeroy’s Cruel Joke was produced by Colton Jean, Dakota McDaniel and Gary Paczosa. Tyler Childers’ Snipe Hunter carries three producers including Childers himself and Nick Sanborn. Kathleen Edwards’ Billionaire was produced by Jason Isbell and Gena Johnson. S.G. Goodman’s Planting by the Signs lists Goodman alongside Matthew Rowan and Drew Vandenberg. Margo Price’s Hard Headed Woman was produced by Matt Ross-Spang.

Four of the five albums have their own artist in the production chair or a peer from the same scene behind the desk. That is a fair description of where the format sits: these are records made by people who are also each other’s producers, engineers and touring companions, and the credits show it more plainly than any genre label would.

Paczosa’s presence on the Pomeroy record is worth noting on its own. He is an engineer with deep roots in acoustic music, and his involvement usually signals a record built around performance capture rather than assembly, which is consistent with how Cruel Joke has been received.

The Emerging Act Field Is Genuinely Emerging

Boy Golden, Crowe Boys, Kashus Culpepper, Ken Pomeroy and Mon Rovîa make up Emerging Act of the Year, and none of them is a long-established name being processed through a formality. That is not always true of newcomer categories, which have a habit of nominating acts several albums into a career.

Mon Rovîa also appears in Song of the Year for Heavy Foot, written by Grant Averill, Eric Cromartie, Cooper Holzman and Andrew Lowe. So two of the five emerging nominees carry a second nomination elsewhere on the ballot, which suggests the voting membership is not treating the category as a consolation lane.

Artist of the Year Is a Five-Way Split

Brandi Carlile, Charley Crockett, Margo Price, Molly Tuttle and Jesse Welles make up Artist of the Year. It is a field with no obvious procedural favourite: Crockett has built a catalogue at a pace few match, Price is simultaneously nominated for Album of the Year, Tuttle comes from the bluegrass side of the tent, and Welles arrived through short-form video with topical songs before the industry worked out where to place him.

Welles is the interesting case for anyone tracking how the format renews itself. A writer whose audience was built on posting songs quickly, often within a day of the news they describe, is not the usual profile for an Americana Artist of the Year nominee. That he is on the list at all says something about how the association’s membership has adjusted to where audiences now find songs.

Duo/Group Puts Three Traditions on One List

Flatland Cavalry, I’m With Her, Mumford & Sons, Turnpike Troubadours and Gillian Welch & David Rawlings share the Duo/Group category, and the range is wide even by this format’s standards. Flatland Cavalry and Turnpike Troubadours come out of Texas and Oklahoma red-dirt country. I’m With Her is a string-band trio. Mumford & Sons are a British band who arrived at the format from a different direction entirely. Welch and Rawlings have been making records together since the mid-1990s.

I’m With Her also take a Song of the Year nomination for Wild and Clear and Blue, written by Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins, which is the trio writing together rather than one member carrying the credit.

Song of the Year Has No Repeat Writers

The five songs are Returning To Myself, Snapping Turtle by S.G. Goodman, Wild and Clear and Blue, Heavy Foot, and The World’s Gone Wrong by Lucinda Williams featuring Brittney Spencer, written by Tom Overby, Doug Pettibone and Williams.

Two of them are solo writing credits, two are group efforts of three or four writers, and one is a co-write with a featured guest. Nashville’s professional writing rooms, where a four-name credit is standard practice, are visible here without dominating, which is roughly the balance the Americana format has tried to hold since it started giving out awards.

Williams’ nomination also carries the longest history of anyone on the ballot. Her presence alongside the emerging field is the practical demonstration of what the association means when it describes celebrating “pioneering mainstays and trailblazing newcomers” in the same evening.

Twenty-Five Years at the Ryman

The Americana Music Association hands out six member-voted awards plus several Lifetime Achievement Awards, with more than 2,000 artists, fans and industry people in the room. The Lifetime Achievement honorees for this edition are announced separately.

The ceremony’s history is bound up with the venue. Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash gave their last live performance together during the show. Past years have featured Allison Russell, Bonnie Raitt, Joan Baez, Robert Plant, Rosanne Cash, Mavis Staples, Buddy Guy, John Prine, Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris, The Avett Brothers and The Blind Boys of Alabama. Harris has described it as “the shining star of Nashville and music everywhere.”

Recent Song of the Year winners give a sense of the voting body’s taste: Nathaniel Rateliff with David Rawlings and Gillian Welch took it for Center of Me, following American Dreaming and Dear Insecurity in the two years before.

Tickets went on sale first to Silver Wristband Holders, then to Festival Wristband Holders, members and the general public. For a room the size of the Ryman, that staged release is the practical constraint on who actually gets to be there.

Why the Production Credits Are Worth Reading

Awards ballots usually get read as a list of names, but in this format the second line of each entry carries more information than the first. Album of the Year is the only category that publishes production credits, and this year they describe a working community rather than a client list.

Jason Isbell producing Kathleen Edwards is a case in point. Isbell is a nominated artist in his own right in most years, and here he appears as a producer alongside Gena Johnson, an engineer whose credits run through a large share of the records this category considers. Neither is a hired outside hand brought in to give a record a commercial finish; both come from inside the same scene the award is judging.

The same logic applies to Matt Ross-Spang on Margo Price’s Hard Headed Woman. Ross-Spang built his reputation on analogue-first sessions in Memphis, and an artist choosing him is making a decision about how the record will be captured before a single song is tracked.

Set against that, the three-producer credit on Snipe Hunter reads as a deliberately assembled team rather than a default arrangement, and the three names on Cruel Joke suggest the same. When four of five nominated albums are made this way, the category is effectively rewarding a method as much as a set of songs, and that method is the one this music has always claimed for itself: play it in a room, capture it honestly, and let the arrangement carry the weight.

What to Watch on the Night

The double nomination is the thing to follow. An artist who wins Emerging Act and loses Album of the Year has had a good night by any measure. An artist who takes both would be an unusual result, because it would mean the membership rated a debut-stage record above four albums from writers with far longer catalogues.

Either outcome tells you something about where the format’s centre of gravity sits at twenty-five years old. Provenance has always been the story in this music, and the credits on this year’s ballot are unusually easy to trace. Our recent piece on how Matty Frank and Dooda came by their moths and omnichords follows the same thread from the other end of the scale.