Crow is First Living Recipient and First Woman to Receive This Honor
September 15, 2021 — Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow will be presented with the 2021 Missouri Roots Songbook honor on September 26 live on stage as part of the Roots N Blues festival in Columbia, Missouri.
Sheryl is headlining Sunday night of the three-day festival, which runs Friday, September 24 through Sunday, September 26 in Stephens Lake Park.
Tickets for the Roots N Blues festival are available here.
The announcement was made by Roots N Blues festival co-owner/director, Tracy Lane, who founded the Missouri Roots Songbook in 2018 to encourage the young people of Missouri to take pride in the incredibly rich musical heritage of their home state. Crow will be the first living recipient of this honor and the first woman to receive it. Previous honorees were Chuck Berry (2018) and John “Blind” Boone (2019).
The Missouri Roots Songbook paid tribute to the many musical and humanitarian accomplishments of Sheryl Crow on the Roots N Blues blog:
“Sheryl Crow’s music, with its far and wide reach, as well as the inspiration it has given so many fellow musicians, has helped shape the landscape of American music and storytelling. Furthermore, she has used her connections and resources to give back to the world, broaden the scope of her own creativity through collaboration, and ultimately stay true to the values typical of Missourians and the midwest at large: kindness, dedication, and an appreciation for beauty borne not from ostentation or glitz, but simplicity, generosity, and truth. In a time of such uncertainty and division, Crow’s music is a beacon of optimism and hope around which we can all gather.”
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This year’s Roots N Blues festival is the first one under the ownership of Lane and Shay Jasper, who bought the festival in late 2019 after serving as co-festival directors in 2018. It is the only entirely women-owned major music festival in the United States. In 2020, the first year under its new ownership, the partners set out to book only artists that include women or non-binary musicians, bucking the naysayers who said it couldn’t and shouldn’t be done.
They nailed down Brandi Carlile as their Saturday night headliner and quickly filled out all three days and nights with some of the brightest stars in Roots, Blues and Americana including Crow, Mavis Staples, Mickey Guyton, Larkin Poe and twenty other artists who were scheduled to play on two stages. After the 2020 festival was postponed due to the pandemic, the Roots N Blues festival was able to re-book nearly every single one of the stellar performers for 2021.
See the full lineup here.
