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Videos by American Songwriter
“Fuck the purists!”
Patty Griffin just perked up. She, Miller and I have been having a pretty reserved chat backstage at Tampa’s Ruth Eckerd Hall, where the band will play in a couple hours, discussing their time working with Plant on the Band Of Joy record and the 10 shows that have happened so far. That is, until they’re asked whether they thought there was a certain weirdness to a British man stepping to the stage to accept an Americana award in Nashville, a weirdness that perhaps wouldn’t sit well with purist appreciators of the genre. It’s at this point that they both get visibly riled.
“[Plant’s] more enthusiastic, too, about [American roots music] than a lot of the purists are,” Griffin continues. “About more of it.”
“Purists are a drag,” Miller piles on. “That’s why bluegrass is a drag and jazz is a drag, unless you get people like Brian Blade or Darrell Scott, who go outside that whole narrow way of seeing everything.”
Regardless of his intentions, and despite how unlikely it may seem, Plant is poised to become the new and perhaps-surprising leader of a rather expansive genre that Jed Hilly, executive director of the Americana Music Association, defines as “contemporary music that honors and/or derives from American roots music.” Those words perfectly describe both Raising Sand and Band Of Joy, the former of which Hilly calls a “major milestone.”
“I think it did something different,” he explains. “O Brother was a significant record, and it established the viability of American roots music as commercial product. It also happened to coincide pretty much with the existence of this organization; we started in ‘99, our first conference or community gathering, if you will… You know, that was a huge boost for us. I’d certainly put Raising Sand up there.”
Hilly considers Raising Sand and its success a major contributor in the tipping point that was the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences creating the very first Best Americana Album Grammy award, given to Levon Helm’s Electric Dirt in early 2010.
“I think [Band Of Joy’s] gonna be bigger,” Hilly says. “I think this record is our greatest opportunity to make a dent in the terrible music that the mainstream media has been subjecting us to.”
Plant and Hilly each literally laugh out loud at the prospect of the former’s crowning as the Unlikely King of Americana. But whereas Plant politely demurs, changing the subject to a tricky debate on semantics, Hilly gives it a very real consideration.
“Without question,” he says in response to the possibility. “I think it’s a much broader thing that’s really – I think he could, just as he was in that other world. I don’t think he was trying to be… He knows that he’s been called the king of other things too… [It’s] incredible, too, you know. I mean, Picasso did that, right? He pushed the boundary.”
‘King of .. ‘
no way …. Buddy Miller or Darrell Scott, two of his ‘sidemen’ are far more Kings than this guy!
Fair play to him for lending his name to the idiom, but a King he will NEVER be ….
Thank you
Willow
To be fair, it’s not Mr. Plant who’s claiming any titles here — and yes, Buddy and Darrell in the same band are worth the price of admission all by themselves, especially now that the band has evolved so far beyond the CD. That said, it took Mr. Plant’s vision (and perhaps his deep pockets) to bring and keep this “band of bandleaders” together, and I for one am nothing but grateful for his patronage.